Why rich people are panic-buying panic rooms
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
And interestingly, the owners who spoke to Robb Report noted only a handful of times their rooms were ever used in an emergency. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.
Interestingly, only a handful of drivers have every actually used their airbags. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.The difference is distribution.
With apocalyptic events (pandemic, war, coup, hurricane, etc.), 100% of the population is affected in any given region perhaps every 50-200 years on average.
With serious car accidents, a fraction of a percent of the population is affected every day.
We don't tend to prepare well for rare events (like wars, famines, plaques, etc.). We do for frequent low-probability ones. Indeed, we're probably most worried about things rare enough to make the news (like school shootings), as unlikely as they are.
Even in the safest countries, you will still have a small percentage of home invasions, kidnappings, and burglaries. That’s why people have locked doors, alarm systems, barred windows, guard dogs, actual guards, electrified fences, and finally panic rooms if all of the above fails.
My odds of being unsafe in my home under normal circumstances are small. I'm not going to argue that if you have a billion dollars, you shouldn't get a panic room. Kidnapping a billionaire is much more worthwhile than a normal bloke, and I have no idea what the risk are. For most people, though, the odds are very low.
If I were rational, at my economic level, I'd have food stashed away, a few guns, medical supplies, and similar. However, I'm lazy. It's like backups. It's a good idea, but....
Richer people might have more, and poor people might have less. I've read about safety plans for rich people, and they're interesting. If you've got a few billion dollars, dropping a million or even a few million on a crisis plan is completely rational. Poor people, on the other hand, can't afford something like food+medicine stashed away (especially since they need to be rotated with expiration).
Unlike cars, houses aren't replaced every 3-10 years. Retrofitting panic rooms will always be expensive - just like retrofitting airbags to a car without them (no one does it).
Similarly, the cost/benefit isn't there to everyone. Every passenger probably has a roughly equal chance of being in an accident, the likelihood that an average person needs a panic room is much lower than the top 0.001% (and probably bottom percentage in the hood would benefit to, but can't afford it, or even giving up the real estate to one, unless it was the primary bedroom).
Airbags were also expensive predominantly because they weren't being installed - and automakers DIDN'T want to install them: https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html. I'm not sure cost of production or installation was ever really the significant hurdle to their uptake.
Societal collapse can last anywhere from a week, in the event of a hurricane, to decades. Living self-sustained in relative comfort for a week is difficult, doing it for a month is much more difficult, and longer time periods approach impossibility very quickly.
That's not "very common".
Source: https://www.alarms.org/burglary-statistics/ (FBI says 1 million burglaries)
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
It's actually less: 1,681/year over 30 years, although it seems like it went up toward the end of the range, so I wrote 2,000.
The average driver will file an insurance claim for an auto collision once every 17.9 years. This means that if you obtain your driver’s license at age 16, you will likely have a crash by the time you are 34. This means the average person has 3-4 vehicle accidents over the course of their lifetime
1% die in a car accident
10% serious injury in a car accident
Accidents 1 / 500,000 miles.
https://www.torquenews.com/14335/how-safe-are-tesla-vehicles...
I have been in a few accidents, none that serious so far.
Ironically, and somewhat supportive of the airbags analogy, none of the accidents I had were in cars that had airbags, or those that were, the airbags didn't / needn't deploy. There was one, however, where seatbelts were critical.
My thinking is that if a break in happens when you are sleeping then you won't have to worry about needing to move to the panic room. And you don't have a panic room taking up space in your residence. The bedroom door and shutters could be set to automatically close & lock when your house alarm is tripped (and if you aren't in your bedroom at the time you can access it via a code or fingerprint swipe).
Also, a basic panic room could be set up fairly inexpensively which is useful in case of a no-knock SWAT that got the wrong house. Gives you time to wake up, react, head to the attic and hide out until the situation calms a bit. (I wonder if a SWAT response team would know to check the attic, esp. if the closet ceiling is disguised and reinforcably lockable from the attic side).
Also remember that the object is to buy time. And most threats wont be a tactical threat, but from a random break in from someone that doesn't know much of what they are doing (but will know enough to panic shoot an occupant when they see one).
But if you in your suburban home are so incredibly paranoid about getting burgled, a heavy bedroom door with a lock will provide you 99% of the protection for 1% of the price.
And, unlike a gun and an itchy trigger finger is incredibly unlikely to kill or maim you, a family member, or an innocent bystander.
My understanding is that this is precisely what some of the high-end panic rooms (notably the subterranean form) promise.
It's not really practical to turn any room into a true panic room. Panic rooms are made to be very robust, so you can essentially wait out the threat. Sure, stuff like laminating windows and having strong doors/frames can be good. It's only going to buy you limited time (check out some firefighter breaching videos, lock picking videos, etc; most people wildly overestimate how secure/sturdy their house is; good thing the threats are generally unsophisticated). You could have a disguised hiding spot, like in the attic, but I don't know that it really meets the definition of panic room. Yes, SWAT will check the attic (eventually). And my guess is that if you're worried about being accidentally labeled a threat and shot, that they will be more likely to label someone hiding in the attic as resisting. Although, maybe you can call 911 and they could instruct you how to safely surrender.
Basically, just take some basic precautions that buy you time and make your property less of a target. Then have a plan for when someone might actually gain entry (sounds like you might be interested in hiding, which can be difficult unless you have a purpose built area like you mentioned).
What protects me is the city I live in, the neighbors and statistics.
This is also why I want to have an electronic lock. Everyone is yelling me how I will get hacked and I wipe move to get hacked instead of someone destroying my door.
No, they’re trained to ignore entire areas of a home that could contain a person.
In a perfect world, I'd like to see a setup where when there is police error, the target can still be protected from a panic shooting while still demonstrating that they are not a threat. The other option is to buy enough time to scramble to the attic, then scramble over to a shaft that gets you down into a wall cavity with access to a better hiding spot or an outside escape.
You’re drastically overthinking this. There’s no way to make sure this is only sold to people who are the accidental targets of tactical entry.
Just ban no-knock warrants — especially ones in the dead of night.
2016 - https://www.salon.com/2016/11/06/sweet-home-paranoia-the-pan...
2017 - https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/luxury-panic-rooms...
2018 - https://www.businessinsider.com/luxury-panic-rooms-gun-viole...
2020 - https://www.nuprojects.co/single-post/2020/04/12/why-londons...
2021 - https://robbreport.com/shelter/home-design/demand-for-panic-...
Silversun Pickups - Panic Switch
I don't think a few months are enough in this scenario. All the crops and livestock are dead and probably all the people as well.
For example, you'll get drastically different responses if you ask someone whether they'd be willing to pay X for a panic room, or how much they're willing to spend to keep their family safe.
The LAST thing to do is self-trapping themselves while an assaulter have plenty of time to acquire anything to act against you.
Beside that, not being "rich" but definitively wealthy I choose to flee a big city for a mountain area, hydro-geologically stable, with enough services, not too remote, but still not "sub-urban" or "urban", just because seeing the public parts of Green New Deal, New Urban Agenda etc I realize that in the near future from skyrocketing unrest to cities more and more similar to modern Chinese "Model Cities" that's a needed move to preserve a bit of freedom still not becoming an eremite.
I do that few years before covid and covid itself prove the good aim, here I'm not in a castle, nor a bunker, nor something apt for military defenses BUT I have room for domestic p.v. with storage, freezers, fridge, ... to be not really autonomous but at least have reasonable "buffers" for pretty anything (water, food, energy, a bit of redundant 'devices' etc) enough to suffer less from potential future unreliable services and sporadic scarcity, if both will not happen I'm still shielded from price rises, anything will be paid back even if in a not so little time. Doing more is complicated, I'm an IT guy not a farmer and becoming a farmer is not much interested economically compared to IT nor much easy in the present and probably near-future conditions. In any case autarchy is a bit utopia since I can't produce anything I use at home without evolving toward a small nation-State with enough resources to have enough nukes to protect myself so...
Long story short I think articles about panic-rooms, emigration to NZ etc are more PR than something else. Especially in the terms they narrate.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Garrett
On the US government's efforts on preparedness over the decades, see Raven Rock by Garrett Graff:
I mean, are you talking about rooms that people already own and have installed? Or is this more like physical pentesting for these panic room companies?