It is in the nature of little desert towns to be scruffy and down at the heels. I’ve seen literally dozens of them, very few buck the trend.
Desert land is cheap, so lots tend to be larger. Having room means people can freely exercise their packrat tendencies to hold onto old cars, RVs and other stuff that might come in handy one day.
The lower costs tend to attract impecunious dreamers whose impulses rarely turn into much. People go off and abandon “stuff” that, at some prior time, meant something to somebody. Later it sometimes appears as picturesque ruins but more often as the remnants of a failed dream or a low-density junkyard.
Thus the typical desert town features a random mix of mini-mansions, single-wide mobile homes, hard-scrabble attempts at agriculture or animal husbandry, small ‘ranch’ homes, squatter shacks, and junk, intermixed with sage brush, tumbleweeds, and dry land chaparral. Zoning is nonexistent.
It is possible to buck the trend and do an attractive desert town, the DrsC winter in one such. A couple of more well-known examples include Palm Springs and Palm Desert. Even there, you get to the outskirts and the little outlying settlements revert to the shabby, wind-blown norm.
On the other hand, I just went to the store for some last-minute groceries on Christmas Eve day, and was comfortable in short sleeves! Try that in most of the nation.
Feliz Navidad, amigos.
