I was thinking of our resident urban / apartment prepping SM member this morning, whilst watching the following YouTube Clip He (Ed Gein) hasn't visited our site for some 4 months...I hope he is ok. The website 'City Prepping' has a number of interesting and informative videos focused on city / urban prepping. I presently live in a 2 story semi detached townhouse which has a balcony that gets good sunlight, a postage stamp sized front courtyard (which has 3 dwarf citrus trees and a blueberry bush in a trough planter, and a pocket handkerchief rear courtyard which is about 36-40 square metres, which gets reasonable to good direct sunlight for at least 6 months of the year. The townhouse complex common areas (except for the concrete parking areas and driveways) are largely lawn with some ornamental shrubs and trees. There is much potential for hunkering down and weathering a short to medium term natural disaster. https://www.youtube.com/c/CityPrepping/videos
Try all that in the Ukraine and lemme know how it lt works out for ya! Best plan is to GTFO of any city/ubran area when the baddies come!
While the area I'm in is a "city" in name, it's more suburban region, to the nearby (20 miles away) major urban center. IMHO, the toughest part of apartment dwelling is storage space. Say, for canned food. I can keep maybe a few week's worth, in my kitchen.....but any more than that, I'm having to use alternate storage space, that would definitely complicate the rotation of older food out, and newer food in. Thankfully, water's not an issue, as I have a MAJOR river just about 1/4 mile away.....so I could lug drinking water from there, if necessary.
Ed is most likely dead! This was the guy that couldn't drink tap water! The guy that couldn't eat food from a can! The guy that wanted to kill someone that wasn't wearing a mask....and claim self-defense! The guy that didn't even own a car or a gun! The guy that couldn't imagine leaving LA! Like I said, Ed is most likely dead...or in jail... or a mental institution!
Poor Ed, I figure he is ether dead and mummified in his 19th floor South West Corner apartment, petrified from the inside out from all the soy/almond extra foamy chi latte's and imported canned Kale soup, or he is living in a brand new Van down by the River selling Shrimp, and is a motivational speaker on the weekends!
Yeah, ole Ed was the guy that asked the stupid questions so that no one else had to. Granted, some of the questions were waaaaay out there, but he was from California.
First of all, I adore your avatar! Marvin the Martian rocks! Second of all, can we do a back and forth on this? I feel strongly that personal realities often do not equate to perfect preparation. Yes, we all wish we lived on four hundred acres next to Yellowstone, but most of us don't live that reality. So, I feel this is a terrific topic and possibly a topic that others could find useful. I think the toughest part of apartment dwelling might be community. When we lived in apartments as younger people, I totally agree that storage space was a big issue, but we had great neighbors and we had lousy neighbors. Our managers were a real problem, while they tended to choose pretty good tenants, they were involved with some pretty shady characters in their personal life. Also, due to the somewhat temporary nature of apartment dwelling, creating community could become problematic.
Agreed @Seepalaces, this thread brings up a lot of things most don't have to think about! First, Apartment living isn't going to lend it self to lots of storage, things like food and drinking water and other essentials and going to be very limited! Can you even install a half way decent gun safe, most apartment's I have seen didn't have the floor strength to handle very much, and the older they got, the worse they got! Unless you live in a place that has a garage, a small storage closet is about all you can hope for, and then you gotta proof your stuff against the vermin. Next is the location, how far are you from things? or how easy is it to bug out if needed, thinking all those hundreds of "Neighbors" are going to band together is fantasy, most will have already shown who they Really are long before an Event, so your cooking your own goose if you plan to stay! How fast can you load your car/truck/airplane and boogy out of there? The wife and I were Apt. dwellers for a little over a year while building the house on the ranch, it was a shithole apt, but in a halfway decent location, and was the best we could have hoped for, ground floor, corner apt, next to the garage, it was also back of the complex, with a large open park that was heavy woods against the complex, so we had bug options in the off chance it was needed. Preps were limited by space, and not wishing to look like horders, but we came up with an ingenuous way to hide a 26 gun safe in plain sight. It was the wife's idea actually, we found a good used basic safe and laid it over on it's back in front of the couch, I covered the sides, top and bottom with wood and trim for the corners, and then stained it and then aged it to look much older, I found an old dining table some one had tossed out when they moved out, and cut it down to fit over the door which was a bit complicated because of the lock assembly and dial combo, we built the sides and ends high enough to allow the table top to cover everything, and made it so it fit tight, so you couldn't knock it off! All you had to do was lift it up and expose the door and then dial in the last number and turn the latch handle to access it! We had the normal nosey neighbors, so keeping things stealthy was big. lucky we were only renting month to month, and as soon as we were able to move up to the ranch, we high tailed it out of there! It can be done, but you really need to think through everything, and that means thinking outside the box! Yor not going to get away with having a generator, or large amounts of preps, so you gotta plan and be able to bug if things go sideways! When we were doing this, things were no where near as bad as they are now, no riots, no large camps of homeless a few hundred feet away, and no democrat super majority in control, police that still believed in doing their jobs, and all that, I really feel for those living in apartments/condos now days, especially in blue cities like Potland or Seattle!
Few people if any are unaware of their neighbors and their discussions. the things you throw away other people see and make assessments. Newly married we lived in an apartment for a few years and knew far more than we wanted to in that time. Some neighbors were good others you didn't associate with for obvious reasons. When you don't own your own home there is little you can do that is actually private because board neighbors have nothing to do but watch what's going on outside. If things go south and youre away for any length of time people can start taking liberties with your absence and making all kinds of speculations. If I were forced to live in an apartment, I would choose the bottom floor, being the faster way out in a fire or earthquake. My vehicle would hold all my preps and go bag and be ready to scoot at a moment's notice. A utility-size van and a motorcycle.
