Operation Self-Reliance seeks to make the desert bloom with 200 new homes and agricultural production.
DELTA, Utah—The big pickup truck went rolling down the dirt road, kicking up dust as Phil Gleason drove past workmen in hardhats and yellow vests digging a well for a new solar-powered home.
Miles away from any strip mall or cookie-cutter subdivision, the off-grid community known as Operation Self-Reliance bloomed with housing construction in the Utah desert.
“Think of all the dependencies when we’re in the cities,” said Mr. Gleason, 74, the community’s founder. “We have to drink the water they give us. We have to deal with trash pickup and pesticides.”
“I’m not saying it’s all bad. It wasn’t what I wanted. I needed to do something else.”
Operation Self-Reliance is both a plan of action and a work in progress, Mr. Gleason said with pride. It is a trumpet call for people yearning to break free of the bonds of city life.
Years ago, Mr. Gleason envisioned such a place for like-minded people, built on the time-honored idea of “sustainable self-sufficiency” like the early settlers.
It would be a place where people could live closer to nature, feel safe, raise families, and grow food.
The initial challenge was that “essentially, we had no money,” Mr. Gleason said. “We had no land. We just had a concept.”
But it was a valid concept nonetheless, he said—one based on solid principles of individual self-sufficiency and years of detailed research.
In 2018, Mr. Gleason presented his idea at a boating party on Lake Powell. Three guests stepped forward and offered to invest in the project.
After months of searching for the right place to build, Mr. Gleason discovered a 1,240-acre property was up for sale in a remote location about 100 miles south of Salt Lake City.
The land had once been a working farm used for growing corn, barley, winter wheat, and alfalfa, but it now mainly lay fallow, waiting for someone to infuse it with new life.
Around the middle of 2019, Mr. Gleason broke ground on the project, and the first few homesteaders moved in.
