Real-Estate Shopping for the Apocalypse | Hacker News Reader

Real-Estate Shopping for the Apocalypse

newyorker.com

25 pointsmitchbob28 comments

> An ex-nasa guy had told her that soon the water will rise, “and climate change has nothing to do with it.” Rather, it’s because “two or three planets or asteroids are going to collide and mess up the natural spinning of the Earth.”

wtf

“Rugged individualists” will be some of the first to fall, because they are (largely) alone, with few to no friends to watch their backs.

Tight communities will be the hardest to take down, as everyone watches everyone else’s back, and will gladly come to the rescue.

A tightly-integrated community with a rammed-earth rampart and a tree-trunk pallisade will be more of a deterrent than some Rambo with his family in a bunker, because the former has 600 pairs of eyes (and ideally, about as many weapons) and the latter has a dozen pairs of eyes at the most. The risks are far greater than the rewards for the former, and flipped for the latter.

Of course if all 600 people in your tightly-integrated community survived the apocalypse then chances are you're still living in a functional nation state anyway.

This kind of thinking has been a nonzero factor in my home shopping experience. Not necessarily thinking about total collapse with bunkers, but dealing with smaller degrees of chaos.

For example, I now take a really hard look at how the power grid is arranged leading up to any properties. Miles and miles of transmission lines run through the national forest? Then I need to budget a whole house genset and enough propane for 2 weeks. How is the water infrastructure? Maybe drive by the sewage lift station and see how clean the gate/access is. How old does their generator look. Stuff like that.

I’ll trade you a cup of cooking oil for your generator and one of your dogs.

I'll see your cup of cooking oil and raise you a Bic pen and three lightly-used band-aids.

https://archive.ph/2024.08.28-224908/https://www.newyorker.c...

When I visited New York on vacation I was delighted to spot the fallout-shelter signs posted around the city and it makes wonder what what extent economies of scale make communal shelters advantageous as opposed to every family fending for themselves.

The article does briefly mention a strong example of this in Switzerland:

> "Several European governments considered it their responsibility to provide safe hiding places for their citizens. No nation took this more seriously than Switzerland. In the nineteen-sixties, the country mandated the construction of shelter space for every inhabitant; today there are roughly nine million bunker spots for a population of 8.8 million—enough for some refugees to bring a plus-one."

These Apocalypse Preppers always seem so thick headed. After a real armageddon, where there is no more society, no money and no rule of law present, your "bunker" is going to be pointless. You think the roving warlords and their gangs are going to walk up to your property line, see a fence, and say, "Well, no raping and plundering here, it says 'Private Property'. Let's move along..." Ridiculous. Thick concrete walls will only stop them until they've finished off the easier targets.

Oh, you're going to hire armed security to protect you? What are you going to pay them with? Your stocks and bonds? The minute they're armed (to protect you) they might as well just take your bunker from you.

I think some of these guys are reading too much fiction and believe a lawless post-apocalyptic hellscape would actually be a red-tape-free, libertarian paradise where they can finally live out a tax-free life of luxury.

I don't know, in case of Apocalypse, the probability of being a roving warlord and having a gang is overwhelmingly dependent on having a bunker, don't you think so?

Let's try to calculate an optimal prepping strategy using a back-of-the-envelope Bayesian approach with expected utility. We need to estimate the probability of a societal collapse along with its potential severity. Then, assign utility values to each combination of severity and prepping actions. I think we can actually make informed choices here instead of pretending we know how a highly chaotic, future system might function.

Prepping actions could be anything from a well-stocked pantry to fully equipped underground bunker.

EU(A) = P(C) * Σ[P(S | C) * U(S, A)]

EU(A) is the expected utility of prepping action A

P(C) is the probability of a collapse occurring

P(S | C) is the conditional probability of a specific severity S given a collapse

U(S, A) is the utility of action A given severity S

We can leave it to the reader to make their own decisions.

After the bombs fall the kind of leaders that people will rally around are going to be very different from our current CEOs and celebrities. I'm thinking more Genghis Khan.

It is back to some type of feudalism or like system. Work hard at farm and pay your taxes, either in food or form of fighting men.

The preppers around here boast that because they have guns and you don't, they don't need to grow their own farms because they'll just attack you and steal yours.

What are they going to eat when there's no more people growing food, and they've emptied all of their Alex Jones Prepper Buckets?

Perhaps they will come around occasionally and collect some of your grown food at gunpoint as a tax. What are you going to do, starve yourself to spite them?

Poison them?

And if they make you do taste tests first, and you die, then they're back where they started, all the guns and no idea how to grow food.

1) Don’t be the lowest hanging fruit. 2) Travel outside the country some. A lot of other countries look like they’ve already collapsed. Most houses in Ecuador had tall concrete fences with crushed glass at the top. Almost everyone fortunate to have a home has turned it into a fortress.

When I was there, violent gang members took over a tv news station in Guayaquil just to spread a message on TV. The anti-corruption presidential candidate was assassinated. The Mayor of Manta was assassinated after he said he wanted to add U.S. security to their ports and city. I was woken up at 2am to hear a man screaming bloody murder and watched a man get brutally mugged outside my top floor hotel room in Quito by 4 guys on two motorcycles. —-and that’s one of the safer countries in South America.

Locals have figured out already how to adapt. If this topic interests you, perhaps travel the world a little bit and bring some good ideas home.

3) Don’t underestimate the psychological impact a shotgun has. The sound it makes when you cock it sends fear down any man’s spine. The cocking of it is more important than the shot. As the deterrent is usually enough.

4) Consider growing some fruit trees. If things go bad, you have nice fruit. If things go great, you also have nice fruit. It’s socially acceptable and comes with plenty of plausible deniability. It’s great way to make friends with your neighbors (by giving them home-grown fruit).

Finally to repeat #1: the 5-foot something women in their [non-running shoes] are way more scared than most men will ever be. They’re the lowest hanging fruit. They have to pay a high tax to the homeless guy holding a hammer as they drive by him. You either pay nothing or 1/4th as much.

Even that left-leaning liberal country has a functioning currency, believe it or not. It’s just that in many cases prices have gone up and not so many afford all of the goods, services, and real estate anymore. They used the U.S. dollar there mostly.

Dont be afraid of your money suddenly not working one day. Instead, be afraid of your rent going up by 8% per year. That’s 2x in 9 years, 4x in 18 years, 8x in 27 years, 16x in 36 years. Meanwhile the guy with a mortgage, his payments went up by 0% for 30 years and then became $0 after 30 years. He also might have a bunch of fruit trees.

Strong property rights are the main distinction between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking countries and why the Spanish-speaking ones have so much strife. It’s a bit of a history lesson where the Spanish viewed its territories as colonies to loot while the English knew that strong property rights made safer communities and they were planning on living in them themselves.

The idea that the Spanish empire lacked significant property rights and legal systems is ahistorical. A bloated legal bureaucracy and an infinite sprawling morass of property rights systems were actually important characteristics of how the colonial empire operated. Those rights were also extended much farther than in the early British empire, including to women and indigenous peoples. The breadth and commonality of access to a legal system means historians have a rich source of primary historical documents for social history that simply doesn't exist for the early British empire.

Some of those property rights are still with us today, like Los Angeles's pueblo water rights that helped make it a juggernaut in the water wars. There's relatively few of these remaining today not because they didn't exist, but rather because alta california and new Mexico territories were remote backwaters even by the standards of the Spanish empire and there was a concerted effort to disenfranchise those old titles for various reasons. UC Berkeley came from one such case.

Unfortunately Ecuador has entered a rough spot through a combination of corruption and bad luck. I do object to saying Ecuador is one of the safer south american countries. The southern cone enjoys european like social and economuc conditions.

Colombia is now a pretty safe and reliable country for example. Unfortunately that is one of the factors that pushed Ecuador in a bad spot. As someone said before it became the weakest link.

In any case following the strategies of my south american compatriots is hardly a good idea on a global scale. It creates a vicious cycle of paranoia and inequality which leads to even more problems

Upvoted but there’s no way Columbia is safer. Men are getting drugged by scopolamine or datura there more than in any other country, made to max out every ATM card they brought, and then left for dead or with permanent brain fog. Maybe it’s safer for women but not for men.

After 30 years Mr Mortgage's depreciated house needs a new roof and thousands of dollars in repairs. Meanwhile the property taxes have gone up every year so he still ends up working until he dies just to keep a roof over his head.

After 30 years, a renter has $0 in equity and Mr homeowner has a $400,000+ home he can keep or sell and which has been either appreciating or keeping up with inflation.

In many parts of the country, taxes, insurance, interest, and principle total a couple hundred dollars less than total rent, leaving money left over for repairs. Repairs aren’t always needed as some people are better at not buying a money-pit than others.

In many states, at least the ones that care to protect their middle class, there is a cap on the max yearly percentage increase in property tax on one’s primary domicile only. Commonly this cap is 3%. $3.6k per year property taxes are pretty common (that’s $300 per month). In some cities, that’s just a single rent payment now. Wherever you rent, that tax bill is passed along to the renter anyways.

Keep spreading that gospel. I would be happy to rent to you. It would be nice hearing a thank you for paying off my mortgage for me.

I agree that in many cases home ownership is a better long term wealth strategy than renting. But not in all cases, of course. If Mr. Mortgage is moving every 2-3 years and acquiring a new mortgage each time he may have been better off renting.

Anyway, I'm just trying to provide some alternate perspective, not pick a fight. I own three homes and rent out two of them.

> Don’t underestimate the psychological impact a shotgun has. The sound it makes when you cock it sends fear down any man’s spine. The cocking of it is more important than the shot. As the deterrent is usually enough.

Yeah no. Maybe if that man lives in Devon and hunts foxes. Or maybe it was true when Joe Biden was a wee lad standing in the door of the family’s log cabin in Scranton, pointing his blunderbuss in the air to fire a warning shot at obliging home invaders.

Where I come from by the time they get within earshot of your Mossberg they’re so jacked up they don’t hear a goddamn thing

How about instead of investing in preparing for the end times, we invest in keeping the planet habitable?

Why not both?

From the title, I hoped this might discuss real estate investment strategies in the context of climate change

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