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.