Will This Off-Grid, Solar-Powered Home in the New Mexico Desert Help the Housing Crisis?

Last year, Rod Rylander purchased 10 acres of mesquite and rocky dirt in a remote corner of New Mexico and got busy trying to solve America’s housing crisis on a bare-bones budget. At 85, he’s currently building an off-grid, solar-powered home with $50,000, calling his 1,200-square-foot creation "the sustainable home."

Rylander expects to be done with the house this year and says he’ll break ground on another one, then another after that, until he has ten total. He believes his simple prototype could be a model for a frugal, off-grid intentional community for artists, military veterans, or families with money constraints when the median price of a home in America, according to Forbes, is over $400,000.

Rylander, who worked as a biologist, real estate agent, and builder before leaning into decades of volunteering and social action, built a solar-powered home out of cob and rammed earth in Black Mountain, North Carolina’s Earthaven Ecovillage. He spent the last 20 years splitting time between the "hobbit house" there and Belize, where he volunteered in the Peace Corps. In recent years, however, Rylander says he felt stifled at the ecovillage, and an old itch to build returned.

"I still felt that drive," he says. "I have to be creative."

When Rylander found vacant land in Animas, Hidalgo County, with panoramic mountain and desert views—and more importantly, an existing well—for $26,000, he packed up his Honda Civic and drove 1,700 miles west. The isolated ranching community with approximately 109 residents is in the "boot heel" of the state, so quiet and wild that jaguars have been known to wander over from Mexico now and then.

A father of two adult sons who’s twice divorced, Rylander lives alone on his lot in a dusty, old, pull-behind camper he bought for $2,000. He mostly works alone too, in the 100-degree heat and winter winds. Rylander spent most of last spring and summer pick-axing through the hard dirt to dig out a ground floor for the house living quarters and indoor aquaculture pond, stacking rocks and boulders by hand to build berms and walls. He later bought a small tractor with a box scraper to help.

Rylander is gentle and soft-spoken and treats questions about his retirement as if they are a joke, seemingly amused you’d even ask. "I like to help society," Rylander says. "I’ve been doing that for about the last 40 years and for the next 20 years, I need to hurry and improve on society a little more."

People who love and know Rylander best say his age and health only worry those who don’t know him and don’t understand the unique life he’s led. He was born on a farm in Denton, Texas, and became a devotee of the natural world, developing a lifelong passion for birding. He studied science and math at the University of North Texas and, later, social ecology at Goddard College. He was a curator and teacher at UNT’s Natural History Museum, a captain in the U.S. Air Force, and did additional Peace Corps stints in the Philippines, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. When the UNT alumni magazine interviewed Rylander in 2008, he wasn’t using a car, had no mortgage on his North Carolina home, and was living on $700 a month.

When Rylander went into real estate and home building in his late 20s, he saw the world in ways most North Texans didn’t. He described himself as a hippie "without the haircut" and says he understood, early on, that modern housing didn’t square with the environment or most folks’ savings accounts. He built underground houses with a twist, inventing a "vertical crawl space" that keeps homes cooler in summer and warmer in the winter, with little to no HVAC. "I like to turn liabilities into assets," he told a McCallen, Texas, newspaper that interviewed him in 1981 about his subterranean houses.

Rylander also worked as a park ranger at the Grand Canyon around 2005 and built an ecotourism lodge and education center on the Gulf Coast of Texas in the late ’90s. He lived in seven countries and presented papers on sustainability as far away as Papua New Guinea and Nepal. The more people you talk to, the more time you spend with Rylander—he only ate vegetable stew with beans and oranges in front of me—his age doesn’t seem worth noting. Rylander’s not even sure Animas will be his last stop.

"He just feels like you live until you die, so you live fully," says Amy Belanger, a longtime friend who built Rylander’s website and helped him raise $10,000 (so far) through GoFundMe (his sons each donated large sums). "He’s like the old ship captain who thinks, ‘If the whale gets me that’s the way I want to go.’ If Rod passes away on the roof of his house in the desert, that’s what he would want."

Rylander’s roof was mostly complete when dust devils tore through his property in early May. I see dozens of them appearing and dissipating like a mirage in the desert, on the desolate 150-mile drive west to Animas from El Paso, Texas, a few weeks later. When I turn onto the rocky dirt road where Rylander lives, just a few miles east of the Cochise County, Arizona, border, he is shirtless in work pants and boots, his skin bronze from a full year of New Mexico sun. Rylander is lean but not frail, and his white hair blows around in the ever-present wind as he walks me around the land, pointing out the damage. One 60-pound solar panel had been tossed 25 yards and strips of Naugahyde flap off the roof. Tempered glass panels had shattered around the home, giving the dirt some sparkle.  

Rylander invites me to hear him speak at the first annual Southwest Alternative Building Conference, which is being held a few miles from his home, at the Chiricahua Desert Museum in Rodeo, New Mexico. His presentation, The Alternative Home for Affordable Housing, touches on the slew of approaches to building homes he’s invented and tinkered with, always as cheaply as possible, for over a half-century. He incorporates air tube ventilation found in the Earthship Biotecture (EB) homes popular in Taos, 450 miles north, but he eschews the old tires, beer cans, and especially the concrete commonly used to build them. "Concrete is a big, big energy user and a pollutant," he says. 

Rylander thinks earthships are too difficult and expensive to construct, unattainable for most people he’s trying to house. In Taos, you can rent earthships anywhere from $165 to $450 a night. Four are currently for sale there, ranging from $550,000 to $1.75 million.

Last year, when I visited an earthship-in-progress in Northeast Pennsylvania, the owner told me he’d spent $100,000 so far and was looking to subdivide his land for funds to finish the project. Mike Reynolds, the architect who designed the first earthship in 1979, acknowledges that their cost is a problem. He says he’d like a line of earthships selling for closer to $400,000 or $300,000, and to create a leasing program.

To combat a similar real estate market, Rylander says he’d bypass traditional mortgages and look for other means of direct financing. His sustainable home village, he says, would operate similarly to a homeowners association. "Kind of like owning a condo," he says.

No one at the conference appears to be there to poke holes in anyone's work, but I later reach out to Rachel Preston, a Santa Fe designer and preservationist who authored the book Hacking the Earthship: In Search of an Earth-Shelter That Works for Everybody, to gauge her thoughts on Rylander’s work. "I love Rod's concepts! He has utilized vernacular architectural models from around the world! He is a true experimenter! The thing I like most is he isn’t pushing that he’s ‘legitimately’ experimenting like EB does by pushing marketing fodder and fake accolades," Preston writes in an email.

The drawback to Rod’s work and, frankly, most of the work shown at the conference, Preston says, is that it’s not mortgageable or permittable in most of the country. "And it’s very hard work, which not everyone is cut out for. But he’s sharing what he is learning freely, and teaching people tools they can use for free or very little money, and I respect the hell out of that," she says of Rylander.  

Along with hauling around rocks and boulders, Rylander spends a lot of time scrolling RepurposedMaterialsInc.com for leftover building materials in bulk: hundreds of panels of tempered glass for windows and his aquaculture greenhouse, full trusses to cap the wooden frames and yards of the Naugahyde for the roof. He sees what’s available and figures out if he can use it, giving the home a bit of a fort aesthetic. One exterior wall, in particular, has a familiar vibe. "It’s old gymnasium floor," he says. 

Rylander chose this area of the United States to build his latest home for practical and personal reasons. The curtain to his Indiana Jones-like life of adventure rose right here, in the Chiricahua Mountains over 70 years ago. He was just 14 at the time and on an improbable 1,000-mile road trip in a Chevy pickup with his then 17-year-old brother to go birding in the mountains, known as the "sky islands" for being a welcome respite to birds flying North and South through the desert. 

Southwestern New Mexico has fairly mild winters and it’s also one of the "sunniest" states in the country, second only to Arizona. That helps when you’re going off-grid with solar. Another reason for settling down in the remoteness of New Mexico’s boot heel and the tiny towns in adjacent Arizona is the general hands-off approach local and county government takes with home building. One nearby county has a popular hands-off permitting process, for a $350 fee. It draws folks with a libertarian bent, people who want to experiment, and perhaps, a few looking to be left alone. "There’s not a lot of codes," Rylander says. "There’s a lot more freedom and wide-open space." 

After a dead-silent night in a tent pitched in the shadow of Rylander’s sustainable home project, I wake up at dawn on a Saturday and spend an hour looking for coffee. I strike out in Rodeo, which has a population of about 50, and in Portal, Arizona, which is basically across the street and maybe home to a few hundred more. I backtrack to Valley Mercantile in Animas, a classic general store where you can buy nails, knives, and a loaf of bread. "Just take it," a clerk says when she can’t break a $20 bill for coffee. 

When I return to the Chiricahua Desert Museum, the parking lot is packed with dusty pick-up trucks and Toyota Priuses and an eclectic group of people are milling around outside, men in cowboy hats and Wranglers alongside folks with long braided hair and colorful, ankle-length skirts. The conference was organized by Penni Parrish, a local real estate agent whose name appears on For Sale signs all over Portal’s winding roads. I figure there would be 15 people in attendance, but Parrish says it winds up being 165, practically doubling the local population for a day. Many have driven in from the Tucson area and one man drives five hours south from Arizona's Navajo Nation, where he’s building an earthship shaped like a hogan.

The first speaker is Jonathan Longecker, whose Tiny Shiny Home YouTube channel has 145,000 followers. The Longeckers, a family of six, are building an off-grid homestead in Cochise County, Arizona, have T-shirts for sale, and sell access to how-to videos on their website. His slideshow laments the state of modern construction and housing prices, topics at the heart of Rylander’s project. Rylander, sitting at a simple table with his "Off-Grid Rod" business cards, smiles when he hears Longecker go on about affordability. 

"Why are so many of us searching for something simpler? Why are we drawn to these alternative building methods and why is this movement so important?" Longecker asks the crowd.

Longecker, who’s been using dirt-filled earthbags for foundations and walls, is the first speaker to mention a specific building permit available in Cochise County that appears to draw in alternative home builders like moths to a summer streetlight. He won’t be the last. By day’s end, the Cochise County "Opt-Out" permit helps me understand Parrish’s reasoning for hosting a building conference in the middle of nowhere. Cochise County is hot—literally and figuratively—and she’s got properties for sale. "People come out here to do their own thing," Parrish tells me.

The permit’s official name is the "Owner Builder Agreement" for "rural home construction." According to Cochise County, it allows owners of properties four acres or larger to have lower code and zoning requirements "than traditional residential home construction." The permit also means "fewer or no building plan reviews and inspections being conducted." While many rural counties have limited zoning and inspections, Cochise appears to be one of the few, if not the only, county in America that makes it an official option. I reached out to the county after the conference, wondering if "the Opt-Out," as everyone called it, really is a pass to do or build whatever you want.

"It kind of is," says Daniel Coxworth, Cochise County’s director of development services. A Chicago native, Coxworth was surprised by the "Opt-Out" permit when it was introduced in 2006. It is not, he notes, a permit that would allow property owners to buy acres and live in a recreational vehicle. Owners must also adhere to statewide plumbing and fire codes. There have been minor tweaks to the permit, Coxworth notes. Property owners must now show progress, but that’s not curbing their popularity. Cochise County issued 42 of the permits in 2019 and 116 last year.

"It’s drawing people to the area for sure," Coxworth says.

The Wild West vibe does come with some caveats that affect Rylander and most other speakers building alternative houses with little oversight. "The biggest downside, besides no plan review or inspections to ensure the structure is safe and meets the minimum building safety code, is the county will not issue a Certificate of Occupancy, which lenders often require," Coxworth says.

Parrish says that leaves a small pool of buyers for the homes if an owner later wants to sell. Traditional financing through banks, she says, is "impossible" with the permit.

When Rylander gets up to speak, his slide shows go deep into his past, showing homes he’s helped build around the globe, the simple thatched huts in Belize and raised bamboo homes in the Philippines. All of them, he notes, were made with local materials. In Animas, he has no trees, so he’s resorted to dirt and rocks to build his foundations and walls, noting that submerged homes have steadier temperatures in winter and summer.

"We’ve been conditioned but we can learn from the past. A lot of these new things we’re doing in vernacular construction have already been done, we’re just relearning how to do it," he tells the audience.

Other speakers at the conference discuss heated flooring systems and large battery power for air-conditioning units. Many mention efforts to keep rodents, lizards, and other desert critters out, a concern Rylander doesn’t seem to have. One man discusses his earthship project in Portal, and how he decided to replace traditional earthship tire walls with concrete blocks and rebar. "Sounds expensive," Rylander whispers to me. (Later, when I check in with the couple building that earthship, they tell me they’re estimating the total cost to be $300,000.)

Back on Rylander’s property, before I leave for El Paso, he sits in the framework of his sustainable home in the waning sunlight, already thinking of the next one on his property. That structure will be deeper in the ground, Rylander says, describing a wide circle with only the roof visible, inspired by simple homes in the Gobi Desert. It reminds me of something from my childhood—young Luke Skywalker’s home in Star Wars—and for Rylander, too, living in Animas is a return to his youth, building his latest dream in a land where he embarked on his birding adventure 70 years earlier.

"Oh, you see that?" he says, distracted by the loud streak of black feathers that fly past us. "That’s a Chihuahan raven." 

Rylander doesn’t have a favorite bird—"I like them all"—but scaled quail surround him in the creosote bushes and, now and then, a painted bunting visits him like a flying rainbow. 

Birds build nests, I tell him, the way he builds houses, by using their environment. "That’s true," he says. "Before I came out here, I hardly ever thought about rocks. Now I think about them all the time."  

Top photo by Matt Martian Williams

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