The Man Who Turned a Cold War Missile Silo Into a 15-Floor Underground Condo and Is Almost Sold Out Again

A $300,000 land buy, $20 million in construction, and zero bank financing: inside the Survival Condo Project, the most structurally strange real estate deal in America.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-04-19

Two hundred feet below a dirt road in rural Kansas, past a military-grade fence and an armed guard, there is a swimming pool with a waterslide. There is also a hydroponic farm, a tilapia fishery, a shooting range with three armories, a volcanic ash scrubber calibrated for a Yellowstone eruption 900 miles away, and 12 condominium units, all of which have been sold for cash only, because no bank will underwrite a mortgage against the end of civilization. The man who built all of this is Laurence "Larry" Hall Jr., a former software developer and military contractor who looked at a decommissioned Cold War missile silo and saw not an artifact of extinction, but a floor plan.

The Acquisition

In 2008, Hall paid $300,000 for the Raven Ridge 11 Atlas ICBM silo near Concordia, Kansas, one of 72 hardened missile sites built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1960s at a cost of roughly $15 million each to the American taxpayer. The Atlas missile it once housed was, for a few years after its 1959 deployment, among the most dangerous objects on Earth: an intercontinental ballistic warhead 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. By 1965, the Atlas had been made obsolete by newer systems. The silos were decommissioned. Some were destroyed. Others were sold off, bought by farmers for grazing land. Hall got his for the price of a modest suburban house.

What he bought was not exactly move-in ready. The silo had accumulated 1.3 million gallons of rainwater, which had to be pumped out before any construction could begin. The rusting launch structures had to be stripped. Then came the engineering: Hall spent $20 million converting the 197-foot-deep cylinder into a 15-floor, 54,000-square-foot vertical complex, completed by 2012. The walls, nine and a half feet of epoxy-hardened concrete originally engineered to survive a direct nuclear strike, turned out to be equally suited to their new purpose. The Army Corps had, as Hall often notes, already solved the hard part. They chose the location for its altitude, seismology, and distance from population centers. He just had to decide what to put inside.

What He Put Inside

The answer to that question is, by any measure, an extraordinary list. The Survival Condo contains a saltwater pool with a waterslide, a rock-climbing wall, a movie theater, a bar and lounge, a general store, a library, a classroom, a dog park, a gym, a medical center, a shooting range, three armories, a decontamination room, a jail cell, and a reverse osmosis water filtration system that treats all incoming water as if it were poison. A command-and-control center monitors surface conditions through cameras. Blast valves built into the air intake pipes are designed to slam shut under the shock wave of a nuclear detonation. The dome above the silo can withstand winds in excess of 500 mph. Two 16,000-pound armored blast doors guard the entrance.

The food systems are a particular point of pride. The tilapia aquaponics facility produces fish continuously; the nitrates from fish droppings fertilize the hydroponic garden, which grows 11 varieties of lettuce and other produce. Leftover vegetable matter and fish heads feed residents' dogs and cats. Each unit also comes stocked with a five-year supply of freeze-dried provisions. A volcanic ash scrubber, calibrated specifically for an eruption at the Yellowstone caldera 900 miles from Concordia, handles atmospheric contamination that other structures could not survive. In place of windows, each unit is equipped with wall-mounted LED screens that display a live video feed from surface cameras, projecting the current view of the Kansas prairie in real time. The effect, one journalist who visited described, creates a "prickle of unease": you can see your parked car outside, but you cannot be sure whether the footage is live or pre-recorded.

The Business Logic

Full-floor units in the original silo sold for $2.4 million. Half-floor units went for $1.3 million. Monthly condo fees run $2,625 to $5,250 depending on unit size. Buyers pay cash, not because Hall demands it ideologically, but because no mortgage lender will underwrite a property whose entire value proposition is that the outside world has ceased to function. The facility is structured as a not-for-profit, owned by Raven Ridge of Kansas Site 11, Inc. All 12 units sold. Demand outran the first silo before its paint was dry.

Hall moved quickly on a second site: the Raven 10 facility in Tescott, Kansas, 25 miles away. At 150,000 square feet and nearly three times the size of the original, it is an expansion of both the concept and its ambitions. By Hall's most recent public statements, it was nearly sold out as well. The clientele he describes are self-made millionaires: doctors, engineers, international business executives, and unnamed famous people whose identities are protected by nondisclosure agreements. One Saudi customer had an underground mosque added to their unit, along with a concealed subterranean helicopter hangar accessible by tunnel. Customization, it turns out, does not end at the apocalypse.

Hall himself has acknowledged the economics of luxury were not optional. "Everything goes in chunks of half a million dollars," he told Florida Tech, his alma mater, where he earned three degrees including an MBA and an M.S. The infrastructure, from 200-foot elevators to nuclear-biological-chemical air filtration and redundant power systems, requires a price point that only the wealthy can sustain. "There are many bunker products less expensive than ours," he has said, "and some that are more expensive. But in terms of value, I believe we have the best product."

The COVID Test Run

Until 2020, the Survival Condo was largely theoretical as a community. Units were sold, owners were reassured, but the facility mostly sat empty, providing what Hall calls abstract peace of mind to people living far away. COVID changed that. Families arrived from across the country and sheltered in the silo, most for several weeks. The sterile complex transformed, Hall reported, into a living community: children running between the waterslide and Ping-Pong table, parents bonding poolside, residents debating politics across party lines without yelling. The experience, Hall said, validated everything he had argued. "Before COVID, everyone asked, 'But will we ever really need it?' After COVID, no one asked that question."

The residents' requests during the shelter period revealed something telling about the psychology of luxury survival. They wanted the hydroponic farm, already growing 11 varieties of lettuce, to also produce fresh flowers. They asked that the gym be fitted with a dog treadmill. The amenities that emerged from these requests were not about endurance; they were about normalcy. Hall has a phrase for what the underground produces in long-term residents: "silo sleep." The absence of above-ground noise and light interference, he says, generates unusually deep rest. People come out of their first night underground asking if they were drugged.

The Critique That Persists

Not everyone finds this reassuring. Douglas Rushkoff, author and host of the Team Human podcast, has been among the most direct critics of the bunker logic Hall has built a business around. "The fortified condo is just not a viable doomsday strategy," Rushkoff has said. "It's a Western billionaire's view of the world." His argument is structural: survival, as a species and as individuals, depends on collective cooperation, not retreat into hardened cylinders. "Being human is a team sport," Rushkoff has said. "The only real solution is to all be in this together."

Hall absorbs this criticism without visible distress. He has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and 60 Minutes Australia. He has consulted for every branch of the U.S. military and, he says, worked as a contractor on the first Macintosh computer. He spent time in an intensive care unit battling COVID-19 in 2020, the same year his silo filled up with families seeking shelter from the same disease. He frames the entire project as a moral inversion: a weapon of mass destruction converted into something designed to save lives. "We took something built to kill people," he has said, "and turned it into the complete opposite."

What he built, stripped of its ideological framing, is a real estate product for which there is a sold-out market and no available financing, and for which he has already broken ground on the sequel. The original Atlas missiles were designed to guarantee that if civilization ended, the other side would end with it. Hall's version promises something different: that if civilization ends, the right buyer will still have a place to sleep.