An architect friend who usually designs Manhattan skyscrapers was recently asked to pitch for a far more interesting project. The client, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, wanted him to design a family house in upstate New York with a difference. It wouldn’t just be completely ‘off the grid’, with its own power and water supplies, but — and there isn’t yet an architectural term for this — it would be post-apocalypse. The conventional house would be mirrored below ground with pretty much identical living quarters that would be completely secure and so self-contained that there would be facilities to hydroponically grow plants and vegetables without soil.
‘Americans shouldn’t believe they’re immune to social unrest’ was all the prospective client would offer by way of explanation. He primarily wanted the house as a refuge for his own family but also, he revealed magnanimously, saw it as a possible rallying point for humanity in the event of some future catastrophe.
The strange thing was that when my friend rang a mechanical engineer for advice on a few technical details, rather than be gobsmacked, the engineer said he’d been working on pretty much the same brief for another Wall Street titan. Only he wanted a moat, too. ‘What do they know that we don’t?’ the architect asked me. (...)
There have been doomsday cults in the US since the off, and survivalist militias in combat gear were charging around the woods preparing to fight government baddies during the Clinton presidency. But that’s nothing on the cynical mood now. The chief reason has been Barack Obama winning a second term — many preppers believe he will start trying to separate citizens from their guns, sparking civil war. For the very rich, there is the added paranoia caused by the growing wealth gap and widespread predictions that it could lead eventually to serious social unrest. Drive along the East River into Manhattan’s financial district and you can’t miss a huge billboard advertising a storage warehouse. ‘The French aristocracy never saw it coming either,’ it reads. Endearingly cryptic … unless you’re a twitchy banker and then the threat is fairly obvious. A well-known Wall Street financial adviser, David John Marotta, recently told investors they should prepare for a financial apocalypse by carrying around an emergency ‘bug-out bag’ containing food, a gun and ammunition.
According to James Stevens, alias Doctor Prepper, who is the guru of a movement he prefers to call ‘family preparedness’, most preppers are white, middle-class and affluent. Black people aren’t interested, he says. Read prepper online forums and you’ll pick up on a definite elitism, a view that they’re the chosen few and that some people’s lives are too frivolous to be worth saving. One has to ask how many of these people are simply fantasising about an alternative world in which they are the hero.
Being that hero doesn’t come cheap. America’s ‘disaster preparedness’ economy is estimated to be worth some annual $500 million in sales to ordinary punters — several billion dollars when you include sales to businesses and the government. That’s just the stuff you fit in a backpack. If you have $2 million to spare, you can have your own decommissioned nuclear missile bunker as an end-of-the-world getaway. When a developer converted a 1960s-era missile silo in Kansas into a 174ft deep apartment complex, some sniggered but he quickly sold all 14 of the 1,820 sq ft units. There’s a long waiting list for further silo conversions that he plans. Survival Condo will have enough supplies of site-grown food, and purified well and rain water, to accommodate 70 people indefinitely, says the developer. The flats boast large HDTV panels simulating windows (giving views of a world that no longer exists). The silo also boasts a cinema, spa, classrooms, bar and pool. Zombies and other non-members will be kept out with ground-level security cameras, electric fences and the lethal contents of an onsite armoury.
For those who need to prepare on a tighter budget for D-day (preppers call it TSHTF, or ‘the shit hits the fan’), there are cheaper options such as a 40 ft long, 10 ft diameter corrugated steel tube that can house six and be buried in your back garden. It’s a snip at $72,000, although the fake tree or rock to conceal the air vent is extra. Early buyers were offered a free ten acres at a secret prepper settlement in Arizona so they could bury their tube near like-minded neighbours.
‘Americans shouldn’t believe they’re immune to social unrest’ was all the prospective client would offer by way of explanation. He primarily wanted the house as a refuge for his own family but also, he revealed magnanimously, saw it as a possible rallying point for humanity in the event of some future catastrophe.The strange thing was that when my friend rang a mechanical engineer for advice on a few technical details, rather than be gobsmacked, the engineer said he’d been working on pretty much the same brief for another Wall Street titan. Only he wanted a moat, too. ‘What do they know that we don’t?’ the architect asked me. (...)
There have been doomsday cults in the US since the off, and survivalist militias in combat gear were charging around the woods preparing to fight government baddies during the Clinton presidency. But that’s nothing on the cynical mood now. The chief reason has been Barack Obama winning a second term — many preppers believe he will start trying to separate citizens from their guns, sparking civil war. For the very rich, there is the added paranoia caused by the growing wealth gap and widespread predictions that it could lead eventually to serious social unrest. Drive along the East River into Manhattan’s financial district and you can’t miss a huge billboard advertising a storage warehouse. ‘The French aristocracy never saw it coming either,’ it reads. Endearingly cryptic … unless you’re a twitchy banker and then the threat is fairly obvious. A well-known Wall Street financial adviser, David John Marotta, recently told investors they should prepare for a financial apocalypse by carrying around an emergency ‘bug-out bag’ containing food, a gun and ammunition.
According to James Stevens, alias Doctor Prepper, who is the guru of a movement he prefers to call ‘family preparedness’, most preppers are white, middle-class and affluent. Black people aren’t interested, he says. Read prepper online forums and you’ll pick up on a definite elitism, a view that they’re the chosen few and that some people’s lives are too frivolous to be worth saving. One has to ask how many of these people are simply fantasising about an alternative world in which they are the hero.
Being that hero doesn’t come cheap. America’s ‘disaster preparedness’ economy is estimated to be worth some annual $500 million in sales to ordinary punters — several billion dollars when you include sales to businesses and the government. That’s just the stuff you fit in a backpack. If you have $2 million to spare, you can have your own decommissioned nuclear missile bunker as an end-of-the-world getaway. When a developer converted a 1960s-era missile silo in Kansas into a 174ft deep apartment complex, some sniggered but he quickly sold all 14 of the 1,820 sq ft units. There’s a long waiting list for further silo conversions that he plans. Survival Condo will have enough supplies of site-grown food, and purified well and rain water, to accommodate 70 people indefinitely, says the developer. The flats boast large HDTV panels simulating windows (giving views of a world that no longer exists). The silo also boasts a cinema, spa, classrooms, bar and pool. Zombies and other non-members will be kept out with ground-level security cameras, electric fences and the lethal contents of an onsite armoury.
For those who need to prepare on a tighter budget for D-day (preppers call it TSHTF, or ‘the shit hits the fan’), there are cheaper options such as a 40 ft long, 10 ft diameter corrugated steel tube that can house six and be buried in your back garden. It’s a snip at $72,000, although the fake tree or rock to conceal the air vent is extra. Early buyers were offered a free ten acres at a secret prepper settlement in Arizona so they could bury their tube near like-minded neighbours.
by Tom Leonard, The Spectator | Read more:
Image: Castro
