Homesteading and Off-Grid Living in Taos County, New Mexico

Taos was a real center of the back-to-the-land movement -- and the history is more complicated than the postcard version

Starting in 1967, poet Rick Klein used part of his inheritance to found New Buffalo, a commune on roughly 100 acres in Arroyo Hondo just north of Taos, built around the goal of full self-sufficiency: residents lived in tipis and adobe structures they built themselves, growing vegetables and grain and raising goats and chickens. New Buffalo operated through multiple complete turnovers of its residents before winding down around 1979-80, and its adobe buildings still stand today (the site has operated at times as the New Buffalo Center, a bed-and-breakfast and retreat property). The same year, Stephen and Barbara Durkee founded the Lama Foundation, a drug-free spiritual community about 17 miles north of Taos in the Sangre de Cristo foothills, adjacent to Carson National Forest.

New Buffalo and Lama were the best-known of more than 30 communes and alternative communities that sprang up along the Rio Grande corridor between Albuquerque and Taos from 1968 into the 1970s -- Taos became, by most accounts, ground zero for the movement in New Mexico. It's worth being direct about what this history actually included: the relationship between the largely Anglo newcomers and the area's existing Hispanic land-grant communities was often openly hostile, including documented incidents of arson, dynamite attacks, and threats against commune residents. This wasn't a uniformly peaceful chapter, and it's part of why some of the era's land-use tensions -- over water, over who belongs on land that had been worked by families for generations -- still surface in local politics around growth and development today.

What's still standing from that era, and what replaced it

Of the original commune-era organizations, the Lama Foundation is the one still functioning largely as it started: it remains off the grid today, generating its own electricity and drawing water from a spring supplemented by rainwater harvesting, and it continues to operate as a retreat and educational community that hosts visitors seasonally. Most of the other original communes dissolved, changed hands, or evolved into something else entirely by the 1980s. What picked up the same homesteading impulse in a more structured, legally-sanctioned form was the Greater World Earthship Community near Tres Piedras -- a distinct, later development covered in depth on the county hub, including its specific zoning designation and what its history does and doesn't mean for building off-grid elsewhere in the county. This page is about the broader picture around it, not a restatement of that material.

Today's off-grid land market: real, active, and priced accordingly

That history helped build a land market that's unusually developed for off-grid buyers by national standards. Listing aggregators show a genuinely active market: dozens of off-grid-marketed parcels in Taos County at any given time, spanning small platted lots in subdivisions like Tres Piedras Estates (some as small as a quarter-acre) up to 160- to nearly 300-acre parcels bordering BLM or Carson National Forest land with mountain and Rio Grande Gorge views. Listing-site aggregate figures put average per-acre pricing for off-grid-tagged land in the county in the mid-single-digit-thousands of dollars, and parcels specifically marketed as "homesteads" tend to run considerably higher and larger on average -- but these are marketing-site aggregates from a relatively small, constantly-changing pool of listings, not an appraisal benchmark, and shouldn't be treated as a reliable price index for a specific parcel.

Building off-grid outside Greater World: the standard permit process still applies

The single most important practical fact for a would-be homesteader: outside the specific, platted Greater World subdivision, there is no county-wide "off-grid exemption" from zoning or building permitting. Any new construction anywhere else in Taos County -- including an intentionally off-grid, owner-built home -- still needs a Residential Zoning Clearance Permit and a building permit through the County Planning Department, using the same homeowner building-permit packet available from the department's office on Albright Street. A remote, unpowered, unpiped parcel does not change that requirement; it just means the systems being permitted (solar, catchment, a septic or engineered wastewater system) look different than a standard grid-tied build.

Wastewater is the piece that most often surprises first-time off-grid buyers. Composting toilets are legal to install in New Mexico under the state plumbing code, but a composting toilet alone is generally not a legal substitute for a septic or other approved liquid-waste system -- using one as your only wastewater solution requires conditional approval from the local health officer, and in practice most rural New Mexico properties still need a permitted septic system for gray water and any liquid waste even where a composting toilet handles solids. Confirm the current variance process directly with the county Planning Department and the New Mexico Environment Department's Onsite Wastewater Bureau before assuming a composting toilet by itself satisfies code -- and don't take a listing's "off-grid, composting toilet installed" description as proof that the property is already legally compliant.

Water for a homestead: catchment, wells, and acequias are three different things

A homesteading buyer in Taos County is likely to encounter up to three separate water systems, and they are not interchangeable. Rainwater catchment for household or garden use is a well-established, legal practice here and pairs naturally with an off-grid solar setup, but water intended for drinking needs to be treated and tested, not just collected. A new domestic well follows the same state Office of the State Engineer permitting process described on the New Mexico state hub -- this page did not find a Taos-specific well moratorium or acreage limit beyond that general framework (the 300-foot setback and 0.33-acre-foot cap sometimes cited for Taos apply inside the incorporated Town of Taos's water-service area, not countywide). And if the parcel carries or is near acequia-irrigated land, that's a separate, community-governed system covered in detail on the county hub -- don't assume a homestead's garden or pasture irrigation is a simple well question if it actually runs through a ditch association.