The economy is slowly climbing back, slightly fewer people are unemployed, and your credit card company has decided to up your limit all the way to $250. The signs are starting to point to a recovery, and you know what that means: time to take on some debt and buy a house! The housing market still needs your help, after all. No one's building new homes, and not very many people are buying old ones. But with credit slowly being pumped back in and the playing field leveled (in more of a "decimated" kind of way), if you're a perpetual slacker/renter like me you probably have some people helpfully suggesting that "prices will never be lower" and "now's the time to buy." Well now I have to agree, because I've discovered 20th Century Castles...
See, Edward and Dianna Peden had a dream: a dream of living underground in a concrete tomb with 2,000-pound blast doors separating them from the outside world. So they bought and refurbished the Atlas E missile site outside Topeka, KS and moved in. Unsurprisingly, people took an interest in them, perhaps more in a "what the hell is wrong with these people?" kind of way but they took it as interest in their Mole Man lifestyle. So they did what anyone would do in their situation: they started a real estate company selling missile silos and nuclear bunkers.
"So as you can see it's a bit of a starter home."
How did they acquire these properties? Do they even have a legal right to sell them? Who cares?! Peruse the properties and the first thing you'll notice is the affordability: 22 acres with two ponds for a cool $260,000? That's a deal at twice the price! 15,000 hardened, underground square feet of floor space for $285,000? Sign me up! If you're going to invest in real estate you want BANG for your buck. Now I have to assume you're probably not getting an actual intercontinental ballistic missile with your silo, at least not a working one, but you'll never have to worry about storm damage, nosy neighbors, or crazed militia men assaulting your fortified compound for supplies.
"Oh god, please don't turn the lights off."
"An affordably-priced huge slice of property that comes reinforced to withstand a nuclear attack?" I hear you asking, "What's the catch?" Well as a former nuclear facility there is a small chance some computer in Russia somewhere has your address pulled up on Google Earth and is currently pointing an actual missile at you. The far bigger catch though, and frankly the deal-breaker for me personally, is that based on the available properties you'll have to move to either Kansas or Oklahoma. Apologies to our Kansan and Oklahoman readers, but I've been to both of your states and I would HAVE to live underground in a concrete bunker just to make it bearable.
Would you live in an underground bunker? Would you willingly live in Kansas or Oklahoma? Let us know in the comments below!
Flickr photos (in order) DSC_0092 and DSC_0109 by John Uhles used under a Creative Commons License
