After the Apocalypse, Will We Decamp to a Suburb or a High-Rise?

New York Times

04-03-2025

'Paradise' is a TV show on Hulu about a postapocalyptic society that lives underground in a suburb. 'Silo' is a TV show on Apple TV+ about a postapocalyptic society that lives underground in an apartment tower.
Both are propelled by mysteries. Both feature curious heroes. Both have shifty leaders who lie, blackmail and murder to keep their secrets hidden and their denizens in line.
The shows have much in common, in other words.
But somehow they find opposing answers to a question that seems increasingly relevant in a warming world: If the planet goes to hell and humanity heads to a bunker, what sort of neighborhood will we build inside it? A spacious holdout that tries to approximate a comfortable standard of living, or a cramped locker that saves more lives but leaves the survivors miserable?
By imagining wildly different landscapes in response to the same end-of-the-world conceit, the shows use cinematic extremes to show how civilization and class divisions are constructed through the apportionment of space. People like to live around other people right up to the moment they feel their neighborhood has been overrun by others, at which point the hunger for togetherness becomes an impulse to exclude.
A good amount of today's housing politics fall within these parameters, whether it's a proposal to build apartments in a suburb or a plan to cover farms with a new city. The fact that this debate now extends to fictional bunkers has me convinced that in the aftermath of global calamity, people will be at some dystopian City Council meeting arguing about zoning.
Curious how they came up with their underground cities, I called writers of the two works — Dan Fogelman, the creator and showrunner of 'Paradise,' and Hugh Howey, author of the novels on which 'Silo' is based. I wanted to understand the inspiration for each world and what those worlds tell us about the societal trade-offs between accommodating a lot of people and trying to make those people happy.
The recent wildfires in Los Angeles added a dose of nonfiction heaviness to both conversations. A little over a month ago, in the hours before my neighborhood in Los Angeles was evacuated, my wife and I feverishly packed suitcases with clothes, passports and stuffed animals for our two small children.
Thankfully, our house was fine. But thousands of others are gone, and now the rush to rebuild is running into California's housing crisis.
Los Angeles has the unfortunate distinction of having what is arguably the nation's worst housing affordability and homelessness problem. A longstanding housing shortage is the root, and the only way to fix it is to build more. That remedy will require many of the more suburban parts of the city to fill in with denser housing. Cue the old debate about newcomers ruining the low-density idyll earlier residents bought into.
Mr. Fogelman and Mr. Howey had a lot to say about how cities function and the power brokers who build them. Anxieties about where that power lies drive the plot of each story, just as they do housing politics.
'Silo,' which finished its second season this year and is scheduled to have two more, is a parable about central planning gone awry. The 144-story silo in the series is basically an underground housing project.
It is run by a government with a humane mission, which is to preserve humanity for a long as possible. The problem is that this government will stop at nothing, from distributing propaganda to crushing opposition, to achieve it.
'Paradise' is more concerned about oligarchic wealth. The show, which airs its finale on Tuesday and was renewed for a second season, posits that if the earth becomes uninhabitable, a chosen few will be led to safety not by a state agency but by titans of business.
The mastermind behind the city is a technology chief executive who is both industrious and decisive. She also makes sure that the underground future keeps her before-times wealth in mind.
Mr. Fogelman told me that the inspiration for 'Paradise' came suddenly about a decade ago, after a meeting with a well-known billionaire he declined to name.
'As I was driving home from that meeting, thinking how much power and wealth, how many people under his control does that guy have, a crane in Culver City dropped something really big and made a loud bang,' he said.
He started thinking about how the rich guy would fare if that bang had been the beginning of the end.
'And it just kind of became the start of the idea,' he said.
Scarcity is the condition for after-it-all-ends story lines. What makes 'Paradise' unique is that the story revolves around a future society's efforts to paper over it.
The back story, which is explored in flashbacks, is that a group of billionaires began planning for a climate-related disaster a decade before it occurred. They do this by building a small city under a mountain in Colorado — a project so outlandishly expensive they install their own president to leverage the federal kitty (one might call this a bailout).
Mr. Fogelman, who grew up in suburban New Jersey, said that in his mind the city's founders were trying to demonstrate American continuity. In a recent video call, members of the creative team behind 'Paradise' walked me through a long list of details — from the workings of the overhead 'sky' to the need for powdered eggs — for how they thought the fictional city would work.
As a matter of urban planning, 'Paradise' makes no sense: The city is about two miles wide, but its characters live in spacious single-family homes and seem to drive more than they walk or bike. The design isn't about ease of use but instead is about creating a familiar, Disney-esque scene meant to distract the city's residents from all the death on the earth's surface, Mr. Fogelman said. The goal of saving lives is second to the goal of clinging to suburban life.
'I feel confident that any billionaire who may secretly be building an underground bunker for themselves right now is not building a utilitarian cave,' Mr. Fogelman said. 'They would be putting in screening rooms and want to be able to take a walk down the street with their family.'
Mr. Howey, author of the 'Silo' book series, called me from Miami, where he is building a boat that he and his wife plan to sail around the world. He began the conversation by saying that he has lived in almost every kind of housing one can live in — a farm, an apartment tower, the suburbs, a van — but that it is the ocean life that most inspires 'Silo.'
'You take for granted how much the earth is in flux when you live in a concrete building or a house in the suburbs,' he said.
But people who live on boats lose their homes all the time, he said.
Growing up in the 1980s, Mr. Howey said, he was influenced less by class divisions than by geopolitical strife and fears of nuclear warfare. His silo is a government project, built to hold thousands of people as efficiently as possible.
Centuries later, its citizens have no idea how they got there. The silo's creators have erased history and knowledge of the outside world, and use a handbook of regulations that govern life inside. Images of trees and other aspects of the natural world are outlawed.
The silo cares little about its residents' comfort, because the alternative is the extinction of the human race. And unlike the city in 'Paradise,' it was built with a budget.
'That's why there's a public housing kind of feel to it,' Mr. Howey said. 'It was cookie cutter. It wasn't designed for aesthetic pleasure — it was designed to serve a function.'
Like Mr. Fogelman, Mr. Howey imagined the initial residents as being composed largely of American suburbanites. The basic question of the books is how crazy those people would go without access to sun and space.
'What's the minimal amount to not lose people?' Mr. Howey said. 'I wasn't trying to design a place that anybody would want to live.'
Movies and TV shows have long used the changing landscape as an ancillary character in their stories. From the suburban explosion after World War II, to the decline of the urban core in the 1970s and 1980s, to the downtown revival of recent decades, the places they show reflect the shifting patterns of American life.
Today, it seems, shows have become enamored with visions of less hospitable and abundant earth. 'Paradise' and 'Silo' are part of a growing trove of movies and TV shows ('The Last of Us,' 'Snowpiercer' and 'Fallout' are some others) about how society is organized after catastrophe.
Whether that's tyrannical order or tyrannical anarchy, a silo or a paradise, the answers are darker and more speculative than simple changes in geography. None are especially optimistic (that would be boring TV!), but in their own ways grasp at a future that seems increasingly hard to chart.
'The world is very scary right now,' Mr. Fogelman said when I asked him why he thought apocalypse themes are so popular. 'By the nature of imagining what the world would look like after, at least you're imagining a world.'