Check Out This Missile Silo Turned Condo Building

Written by

Melissa Massello
Melissa Massello
Boston girl gone Austin + pixie dust spreader on the Tilt-A-Whirl. In her past life, Melissa was the founder of Shoestring Magazine, DIY Boston + The Swapaholics. Now she just wants to drink wine, hike, do yoga + save all the damn dogs, is that so wrong?
published Apr 13, 2018
We independently select these products—if you buy from one of our links, we may earn a commission. All prices were accurate at the time of publishing.
Post Image
(Image credit: Survival Condo)

If the last year has made you think the end of days might actually be nigh, you aren’t alone — and it’s no longer just the tinfoil-hat-wearing crowd, either. Luxury doomsday condos are now a thing.

If you have a few million to invest and a fear of the apocalypse, either caused by mankind’s folly or natural phenomena, luxury property developers like Larry Hall have just the condos of your preparedness dreams. Even the logos for these dystopian developments looks like something straight out of the Hunger Games, but this trend is no fictional tale.

Featuring amenities such as a tactical team and fleet of military vehicles with emergency pick-ups available within a 400-mile range of the Kansas location, as well as five years worth of food guaranteed for each person, luxury doomsday condos such as those Hall builds into former missile silos — which he has been scooping up since 2008 as founder and CEO of the Survival Condo Project — are meant to replicate underground as high a quality of life as his residents enjoyed up in the real world, but all from within the safety of 174-foot-deep wells originally built to withstand a nuclear bomb.

Hall recently told NPR that the 15-floor underground apartment complex was designed “kind of like a miniature cruise ship” — starting at $1.5 million for a half-floor, 900-square-foot unit, with luxury bunker building amenities such as a rock climbing wall and gym, a dog park, a market (presumably stocked with the foodstuffs grown on-site through hydroponic and aquaculture gardening), a medical center, an arcade, a library and classrooms, an indoor shooting range, a movie theater, and an indoor pool with onsite spa.

And Hall is not alone in investing heavily in this idea. As The Atlantic reported in its March 2017 issue, emergency preparedness resorts of this style are only growing in number — in part because we recently got the closest to the Doomsday Clock as at any time in history since 1953, during the height of the Cold War.

(Image credit: Vivos)

Projects from the scratch-built Trident Lakes in Texas, a “5-star playground equipped with defcon 1 preparedness”, to Vivos Europa One in Germany, a former Soviet armory turned luxury survival community, are all part of the growing luxury doomsday real estate industry — worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and rising.

Earlier this week, I happened across an old episode of Quantum Leap on TV in which Sam (Scott Bakula) goes back in time to save the family of a nuclear fallout shelter salesman, who is panicking in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the end of the episode, Sam convinces the dad to abandon the idea of building residential bomb shelters in suburban backyards in favor of swimming pools — a “growth industry.” But if you still have one of those midcentury bomb shelters in your backyard in real life, maybe now is the time to consider it an asset worthy of being restored and renovated — even a future selling point for your listing.

h/t Zillow