5 ms·

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

79 points by raheemm 12y ago

chrissnell 12y ago
There were no coordinates given in the listing but I think this may be the place: http://goo.gl/maps/mH7d9 http://goo.gl/maps/mH7d9
- rev_bird 12y ago
  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.
  - jqm 12y ago
    The square patches and mysterious dirt roads are for oil wells.
  - cwal37 12y ago
    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/@-23.1991868,17.2220959,1442999m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x1bf53c7e6ed37521:0xd3b9e5a5a8ecb261 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Namibia/@-23.1991868,17.22...
MCRed 12y ago
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 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.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  Great info! What were you planning to do?
  - soylentcola 12y ago
    I'm thinking ball pit.
    - MCRed 12y ago
      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.
  - MCRed 12y ago
    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.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  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.
  - robszumski 12y ago
    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 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.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- smeyer 12y ago
  What do you mean "they don't even list a rough price"? It says in the article the list price was $295k along with a link to the listing then says the offer was close to the asking price. The price in the the article is right next to where they have the link you've included in your comment.
spiritplumber 12y ago
Sounds like the perfect place to take my X-Com collaborative writing project to the next level!
peapicker 12y ago
Having been there, it is hard to imagine wanting to live in/near Roswell.
- jqm 12y ago
  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.....
  - 12y ago
ChuckMcM 12y ago
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-88201-C2122348538 http://www.century21.com/property/8422-clovis-hwy-roswell-nm...
raheemm 12y ago
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.
ghostDancer 12y ago
From userfriendly.org : http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010611 http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010611 and the following strips
jrockway 12y ago
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!
- divegeek 12y ago
  No noise from neighbors? No neighbors at all!
ruanmuller 12y ago
There's a number of silo conversions that have been done in the past, some with fantastic results: http://www.silohome.com/ http://www.silohome.com/ http://dornob.com/ultimate-underground-home-converted-nuclear-missile-silo/ http://dornob.com/ultimate-underground-home-converted-nuclea... http://www.gizmag.com/luxury-survival-condos/34861/ 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.
- lectrick 12y ago
  A little reminiscent of the Fallout post-apocalyptic game series.
prawn 12y ago
At that price and depending on clean-up costs, you could potentially make money setting it up as a really novel AirBnb property.
lectrick 12y ago
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".
- jqm 12y ago
  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.
  - lectrick 12y ago
    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 ;)

79 points by raheemm 12y ago

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

rev_bird 12y ago
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.
- jqm 12y ago
  The square patches and mysterious dirt roads are for oil wells.
- cwal37 12y ago
  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/@-23.1991868,17.2220959,1442999m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x1bf53c7e6ed37521:0xd3b9e5a5a8ecb261 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Namibia/@-23.1991868,17.22...

MCRed 12y ago

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 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.

mattmanser 12y ago
Great info! What were you planning to do?
- soylentcola 12y ago
  I'm thinking ball pit.
  - MCRed 12y ago
    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.
- MCRed 12y ago
  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.
vonmoltke 12y ago
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.
- robszumski 12y ago
  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 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.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

smeyer 12y ago
What do you mean "they don't even list a rough price"? It says in the article the list price was $295k along with a link to the listing then says the offer was close to the asking price. The price in the the article is right next to where they have the link you've included in your comment.

spiritplumber 12y ago

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

peapicker 12y ago

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

jqm 12y ago
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.....
- 12y ago

ChuckMcM 12y ago

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-88201-C2122348538 http://www.century21.com/property/8422-clovis-hwy-roswell-nm...

raheemm 12y ago

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.

ghostDancer 12y ago

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

jrockway 12y ago

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!

divegeek 12y ago
No noise from neighbors? No neighbors at all!

ruanmuller 12y ago

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

lectrick 12y ago
A little reminiscent of the Fallout post-apocalyptic game series.

prawn 12y ago

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

lectrick 12y ago

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".

jqm 12y ago
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.
- lectrick 12y ago
  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 ;)