The Decision To Homestead.

Many Americans have been making the decision to pack up their lives, and begin living in a more self sustaining, and often isolated lifestyle known as homesteading. These aren't your run of the mill survivalist types, or Qanon nuts, the people doing this now are from all different backgrounds, political leanings, and religions. So why are so many people jumping into a lifestyle that is such an extreme shift from their suburban, or city life?

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There is an organization ironically called H.O.A. or Homesteaders of America, who ironically have no love for HOA’s or Home Owners Associations, in fact their entire “Self Sustaining” model is antithetical to the whole suburban HOA practice of regulation and restriction of a property owners freedoms with what is done on their land. In fact, many have begun to argue that HOA contracts are often unconstitutional when it comes to restricting ones ability to self sustain. For instance, by telling residents that they can not quietly raise chickens in their back yard, is a violation of their constitutional freedoms. Personally, I totally agree.

Back to the point, Homesteaders of America run polls and keep basic estimates of the number of self sustaining folks based on polling. They estimate that within the last 5 years, an average of 60,000 new American homesteads have popped up per year since the beginning of Covid. That is an almost 500% spike from previous years. This would lead one to believe that COVID - 19, and the safety of isolation that we saw in the worst parts of it frightened many of these folks into homesteading. It seems logical right?

What the polls actually show is actually something entirely different. Out of 4,000 homesteaders polled, less than 10% cited Covid as a contributing reason. The number one answer, and this one surprised the hell out of me, was “Growing organic vegetables, and raising livestock.” In short, they don't trust groceries off the store shelf to be “Organic and healthy,” or they can not afford the cost of the healthy foods. Over half of the people cited “Not paying rent, or electric bills,” as being one of the big contributing factors. This is one reason that I sympathize with. If I want to live near the area that my family lives in, anywhere within 2 hours of my hometown, the rent is an average of $2,700 per month for a 2 bedroom apartment, and $3,100 for a 2 bedroom house. Let's say I could find one a bit cheaper, at $2,500 per month. That is $30,000 for one year of rent. . you don't own anything for it, and you don't get it back. For $15,000 you can find 2 acres of land, build a shipping container house for $8,000, and buy a nice solar and wind set up with the storage batteries, and all for $4,000 and it will produce more electric than they will need. All for less than one years rent.

Then there are the health benefits to having home grown foods. Just look at the Amish and their health, none of their foods are FDA approved, or have USDA stamps on the packaging. Yet they have these health benefits and itself that is completely priceless, to have less than 1/3rd of the risk of having health issues like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. At an average food cost of $1,250 per month per household of 3, this is another insane amount of working at a blue collar hourly wage job to afford.

You can really boil both of these down to economics, and a failure of our system to manage our housing cost, and grocery prices. Either by design, or sheer blunder the cost of everything from gas to eggs exploded between 2021 - 2024 to almost 200% more than previous 4 years. Call it COVID, or beurocraric blunders that lead to Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguards subsidiaries buying up all of the residential single family housing they could, and artificially inflating the Property values. Either way it's been made impossible for 2 working parents with blue collar jobs to afford rent, groceries, and utilities, while also maintaining a vehicle and auto and health insurance payments. That is what has ultimately caused this trend of homesteading.