For Sale: Deep, Spacious Roswell Property, Once Occupied by a Missile | Hacker News Reader

For Sale: Deep, Spacious Roswell Property, Once Occupied by a Missile

nytimes.com

79 pointsraheemm29 comments

The potentially new owners (the listing[1] is marked "sale pending") would definitely have a lot of work to do but fortunately it does not look like the silo is below the water table. I looked at silos for a while and a lot of them were simply full of water as they required constant pumping if you wanted to keep them dry. Not all silos kept the missile vertical (like this one apparently did), those have large doors which can open up (assuming enough power/hydraulic fluid). Given the 51' diameter by 300' deep measure of the silo, if you put an elevator right down the middle you could have 25 floors of 'pie shaped' rooms (assuming a 1/4 section per room that is approximately 1900 sq feet per floor (47,500 sq ft total) That is a pretty big workshop space :-)

[1] http://www.century21.com/property/8422-clovis-hwy-roswell-nm...

In the last decade I spent a fair bit of time working on the idea of buying and refurbing Missile site. I researched Atlas, Titan and Nike sites and even joined a list of ex-air force missileers. One thing about those guys who spent years in them- they talked a lot about the hazardous chemicals, and when one of these sites would come onto the market often people who had worked there would talk about accidents that had happened and various dangers.

To be explicit: What the Air Force considered "Safe" for a situation in which the guys in the station are a long way away in a control room, and what you might consider safe for your house or work environment are very different. The fuel refilling area, where there was a massive spill that wasn't really cleaned up, might be your living room, if you did a conversion. Not saying it's not safe, just be aware and if you go into this, find some guys who served there and get their info.

The TLDR of my years looking into this: 0. Nikes were first and are little more than garages with opening roofs. Not too exciting. Atlas was the next generation and these have buried silos and control rooms, there were several models with the Atlas -F probably the most interesting. Titan is the Big Kahuna of them. They have miles of tunnels and usually multiple silos (I think they cam in 3, 6 and 9 configurations) and massive power rooms and control rooms and all kinds of stuff.

1. The people selling them have dollar signs in their eyes, much of the time. One Titan site I ran down the history of (I doxxed the owners effectively) was bought for $30k in the early 1980s, has never been listed for less than $1M, has never sold, and most recently was listed for $3M. This despite a massive hole in the power station wall, which alone will cost $300k to fix, probably. Most of these are absurdly priced. Realistically, it doesn't matter if the government spent $300M building it, an unrenovated site should cost maybe $100k more than the land itself. The cost of renovation will be more than the cost of getting an equivalent housing built from scratch by a "survivalist" oriented builder, in most cases.

2. If it's not renovated it's going to cost you a lot to renovate. IF that Titan site had been renovated (like some of the homes in Kansas) then maybe it would be worth $3M But renovations to make something like this livable, extremely expensive, and problematic because who wants the liability of making a home out of a toxic waste site (the silos in Denver area are sold with an attachment declaring them such, and I think forbidding living in them.)

2a. If you don't have $300k (atlas maybe) - $1M (titan, minimum) for renovations you may not be ready for this. (There is a couple near Kansas City that renovated an Atlas, probably for a lot less, and they used to give tours.)

3. The best place to go is probably here, if you're serious: http://www.missilebases.com

4. The same sites come up for sale, over and over again, over many years (see #1) They aren't building any more but they aren't running out of them. Supply remains pretty constant.

An anecdote: I discovered the owners of the Titan site I wanted were real estate pros in California, and was hoping they were really leveraged. This was during the bubble (which having studied economics I knew would collapse) I was hoping they'd be desperate to sell their site after the bubble collapsed and after we were more than 5 years away from 2001 (and the survivalist surge that happened right after). Alas I was wrong, their prices went up. Since the crash their prices have come down a bit, but they're still 10x where it makes sense.

Great info! What were you planning to do?

I'm thinking ball pit.

Many times the silos get flooded. The equipment is pulled out when they are abandoned leaving a lot of half broken stuff (eg: they don't care about stairs but might care about the thing holding them up).

I know of one that was used as a cave diving environment, but seems really dangerous to me.

I just wanted an underground home, and to have the tunnels renovated to be usable. Several miles of tunnel would make great hiking trail and all that. Would probably have just put up a barrier at the silos and set up lights so you could look down into them... too difficult and expensive to turn them into anything.

Just to be clear: Nike as a family of nuclear surface-to-air missile systems; the Atlas and Titan were families of ICBM. The Nike system had rail launchers like conventional SAMs designed in the 1950s through the 1970s, but were kept in armored bunkers until needed to keep them from being destroyed in a preliminary strike. The facilities for Nikes and ICBMs are very different, and Nike facilities are usually located near large population centers because they were only built at high-value targets.

If you're in SF and haven't been the to Nike site run by the National Parks Service, you should go. It's site SF-88: http://www.nps.gov/goga/nike-missile-site.htm

On certain days they actually open the bunker doors and will raise and lower a missile.

I've been into one of the Titan sites outside of Denver - I was given a tour by the owner, as I had some interest when he was trying to sell it.

I ended up walking away because of the dangers and regulatory barriers, as you mentioned. The owner had found old explosives on the surface, toxic materials inside. Everything other than the control room had asbestos. The elevator was broken, so he had put some lights down the stairwell with extension cords... but once at the bottom, you needed flashlights to get around. You ended up dressing up in hazmat suits just to look at the place. The ladders to get to the various levels in the power dome were steep, and navigating that part of the site in the dark, while it was full of old scrap metal and debris... definitely not safe. The control and power domes were dry, but the silos were partially flooded. That was 15 years ago, so I have no idea what has become of the place since that time.

I will say that looking at images and diagrams of these old sites does not really give you a perspective of their scope. The power dome was probably the largest single room I have ever been inside... and it was underground. The control dome had gaps on the edge, so you could look underneath and see these huge springs that held everything up, designed to stabilize it in case of an attack. It may have been a dangerous place, but still really cool to explore. I wouldn't go in without the owners, though - even though most of these can be broken into, if you got hurt down there, that would be serious trouble.

Even if you can purchase these properties cheaply, there is still a lot of work to do, and it is more than most people can really handle. But it can be done if you have the money and time, and people have done some really nice jobs of it in other locations.

There's a number of silo conversions that have been done in the past, some with fantastic results: http://www.silohome.com/ http://dornob.com/ultimate-underground-home-converted-nuclea... http://www.gizmag.com/luxury-survival-condos/34861/

Can't help but think that maintenance of such a thing could be very challenging after a while.

A little reminiscent of the Fallout post-apocalyptic game series.

There were no coordinates given in the listing but I think this may be the place: http://goo.gl/maps/mH7d9

It may sound dumb, but I'm absolutely fascinated looking at the desert in Google Maps. It's just so... empty. Mysterious little dirt roads, unexplained (but very square) patches of cleared area, and every once in a while, boom, a missile silo.

The square patches and mysterious dirt roads are for oil wells.

Not dumb! Deserts are beautiful and amazing. If you never have, take a peek at Namibia[1] (my favorite visited deserts to date).

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Namibia/@-23.1991868,17.22...

If it has a good Internet connection, and is well-ventilated, I bet half the people reading this would be OK with living there.

I'd install a camera up top and hook it up to a large 4k display for a "window".

Internet connection is wireless only (unless you get a phone line to property). No broadband and cell coverage is hit and miss.

5Mbps is about as fast as you can reasonably get and runs about $80/month. It lags very slightly, and the receiver better stay pointing right at their tower. The winds sometimes shift the receiver a little, and it has to be adjusted or speed really drops.

Yeah, I would fix all that. I'd run a fiber out there myself if that's what it took lol. And lag, lag is right out unacceptable.

Of course, this is still merely a fantasy in my head at this time ;)

I would love to live in a missile silo. Great insulation. No noise from your neighbors. Tornado warning? Not a problem. I can't think of any downsides!

No noise from neighbors? No neighbors at all!

Having been there, it is hard to imagine wanting to live in/near Roswell.

I live in Roswell, and am trying to think of a reason to disagree with you....

If you really value remoteness and open space it's good. I live on a hill on some acreage outside of town and can see nearly 40 miles off my back patio without a houses or building in view. I can (and sometimes do) shoot guns from my back porch.

But, If you want to be near decent restaurants, stores with clothes you might actually wear, and people you can hold a conversation with.... it's probably not the best place.

Oh, don't let me forget the wind and dust-storms. It's blazing hot in the summer, but the winters are fairly mild. The economy is not good (except during oil booms)... wages are very severely depressed, there is not a lot of educated people nor people with ambition as they have left for the most part. The general culture reflects this degeneration. Lazy and slow and non-curious is a way of life.

So why am I here? (I'm not from here). Well... you should see the night sky for one. Far away from big cities in the desert.... you feel like you are right there in the universe and the milky way is a river of light. But truly, the desert to the south (Carlsbad to South Texas) or west of here (Arizona) is a lot more amazing as far as plants and scenery. This is is really the very far Southwestern edge of the Great Plains. (Actually... its a girlfriend thing, that's the real reason. But the sky is nice.).

This site is about 20 minutes outside town. Not too far away are the mountains.. an hour or so from a ski resort (Ruidoso... a pretty little town but not much there). It's on the very edge of the foothills as the plains start turning into the Rockies. The drive up the canyon to Ruidoso is quite pretty. The site is right off the highway (power close or right to site) and has BLM ground surrounding it. There are no trees nor large cactus... it's arid grassland with cholla and prickly pear cactus and low scrubby mesquite. There are lots of coyotes, hawks, antelope, foxes, porcupine and skunks. And rattlesnakes. I found 7 of them on the property over last summer. The soil is caliche... old ocean bed reef, and hard as a rock. You would have trouble growing anything between the critters and poor soil. A decent well would probably be around 300 feet deep and the water very very hard. I'm not sure it would be an acceptable place to live for anyone but the most hermit minded.....

I grew up in Farmington and lived in Las Cruces and Albuquerque. Spent some time in Ruidoso as well, as my uncle is a pipefitter and helped redo the Inn.

It's still hard to explain to people what living in a place like Roswell or Farmington is like. Both places swing up and down according to oil prices. both are big enough to have just barely what you might want or need, but not much more. More importantly, they are their own big cities. And that's the thing that people don't get: When the nearest (modest) cultural mass is at least three hours away, you don't live anywhere near an interstate, and every other town is an order of magnitude smaller, everybody tends to stay put and things get insular (not necessarily in a bad way though) and weird.

I've gotten in arguments about this before from people who claimed they grew up in smaller towns, but the key difference is those small towns aren't their own isolated islands. I liked growing up there as a kid, but I'd take a small town of 2000 people an hour away from a major city over the Ruidosos and Farmingtons in a heartbeat.

On the other hand, the desert was literally our playground as a kid, and that's an amazing thing to grow up with.

BTW: Lots of great astronomy still happens around Cloudcroft if you ever get up there.

Great summation. Especially the island part. That is exactly what it's like. Living on an island. The surrounding desert is the ocean. Three hours to get anywhere (and it's not much of anywhere when you get there). 8 hours to a real cultural center like Denver, Dallas or Phoenix.

From userfriendly.org : http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010611 and the following strips

At that price and depending on clean-up costs, you could potentially make money setting it up as a really novel AirBnb property.

The military designed the missiles and the bunkers that housed them with the utmost urgency, working at a moment when the concern over national security was so severe that it bordered on panic.

Sounds like the perfect place to take my X-Com collaborative writing project to the next level!

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