Pima County, Arizona · near Tucson · APN 301-69-2230: Build Your Own House on Open Desert Ground Southwest of Tucson

A House of Your Own, Out Where the Pavement Runs Out

Maybe you've watched Tucson prices climb for years and figured a house of your own was somebody else's story. Out here, thirty-some miles southwest of the city, the math reads different. This is flat, open desert you can actually build on, the kind where you draw up the house you want and then go put it up.

Picture a house you drew up yourself, solar on the roof, a well or a water tank, and room left over for a shop, a garden, and a fire pit where the kids learn the constellations. Home builder on a budget, off-gridder tired of a power bill, retiree after some elbow room, fellow whose old HOA once fined him over his mailbox color? This ground has room for all four. What you put up out here, you put up to keep.

Three Points sits about fifteen minutes north, where AZ-86 meets AZ-286, with gas, a market, a school, and a community center. That center is the old Robles ranch house. A mail carrier named Bernabe Robles set up a stage and watering station out here in 1882, and the settlement that grew up around it still carries his name. When you need the full aisles, Tucson is about forty minutes east.

Here's the plain part: no power line at the lot, no city water, so you're off-grid from the first nail. Out here that suits the place. The sun does the heavy lifting and nothing hums on a meter.

The desert around here has been letting people start over since before Arizona was a state. There's room in it for one more.