How’d you like to life in a old nuclear missile base? Maybe it’s not for you, but there are more people that want to than missile silos available. It’s a good time to be a missile silor real estate agent. The Verge has more:
A home like Ed’s is an anomaly. In 1960, taxpayers paid $3.3 million to construct a facility with floors that were three feet thick, walls eighteen inches thick, and ceilings consisting of 18 inches of heavily reinforced concrete, three feet below ground. As he points out, “some of these missile sites are some of the strongest structures ever built on the planet.” While a handful of these structures were sold off by the government after being decommissioned in the 1960s and 1970s, current arms control treaties with Russia mandate that decommissioned missile sites are to be destroyed. This means that, as demand for nuclear hardened structures increases, the supply never will. These are relics from a time when government money paid for engineering marvels that were sold a few years later for pennies on the dollar.
“We see these sorts of structures as the twentieth century’s counterpart of the European castle: built by the government for defense of the realm at tremendous cost to the royal treasury, and now they’ve been turned over to a peasant and we’re really happy to be here.”
Ed’s company is called, fittingly, 20th Century Castles, LLC. So far he has sold 55 properties over the last 17 years, and as time goes on, it seems likely that demand will continue to rise. “Especially in the last couple of years,” Ed says, “our email and telephone have been busier than usual, because people are seeking the strength of a hardened underground structure.”