Double D Ranch changes hands
New owner to focus on restoration, housing
After years on the real estate market, the Double D Ranch has changed hands.
The new owner, an ambitious free-thinker from Los Angeles, has big plans for the property, ranging from conservation and habitat restoration, to building affordable housing and creating an artists’ retreat complete with a recording studio.
“I was just going to take a 10-day trip to New Mexico, and when I got to Santa Fe, I wasn’t really feeling it there,” Asher Luzzatto said. “Everybody I talked to said I should go check out Taos. Literally the day I got here, I called my wife and said, ‘I think we should live here.’”
Wife Emily Luzzatto agreed, and they soon learned that the Double D Ranch was for sale, with an asking price that had been reduced from $5 million to $3.5 million. Dee Dee Miller, longtime owner of the Double D, said she knew almost immediately that Luzzatto — who appeared unannounced at her ranch house door offering to purchase the ranch — was the right buyer. She’d turned down other offers.
“I think she respected that,” 34-year-old Luzzatto said, adding that he and his wife elected to change the Double D’s name to Hyperslow Ranch — Hyperslow being the name of the couple’s yoga studio and cafe in Los Angeles.
Luzzatto, who recently ran for Mayor of Los Angeles on a campaign that emphasized solutions to the city’s housing and homeless crisis, is a 34-year-old lawyer and real estate developer who came to New Mexico in January to work on a book about DAOs, or “decentralized autonomous organizations.”
The most high-profile example of a DAO is the blockchain technology underlying crypto currencies, but Luzzatto sees an application for the technology in the real world. It dovetails with a long-term goal he has for the ranch: to someday create a self-governing community that enables access to affordable housing.
Having worked for his family’s multi-generational real estate company for five years, Luzzatto is familiar with real estate market trends that freeze out low- and even middle-income buyers and renters. The market in Taos County is no exception, and Luzzatto has several outside-the-box plans to help address the issue.
“You could basically create housing communities in remote places that could be governed by these decentralized autonomous organizations, which are effectively like a decentralized governance structure,” he said. “And they could even issue their own cryptocurrency so there’s an internal financial mechanism that allows for a modern form of bartering, skill sharing, resource sharing, etc. These communities would be able to both govern themselves, but also live in a sort of Taoist harmony with nature and an intention to the arts.”
Luzzatto said technology is key to building affordable housing and staving off the climate crisis.
“I believe in technology as a tool for human good,” he said, adding that 3-D printers offer a solution to the housing crisis while also providing sustainable avenues for making mechanical parts, equipment and other materials at a local level instead of relying on carbonreliant global supply chains.
“This is the most promising technology that I see, because it matches the desperate need for housing,” Luzzatto said. “and it fits into this [DAO] model of a group of people pooling their resources together to buy a 3-D printer. I see a future, way out there, when you will have rural communities all over the place, and all of them will have a 3-D printer — with a computer that far exceeds our computers today — that can print replacement parts, materials, that can fix things, that can re-plumb — that can be a community resource.”
Luzzatto, who has also purchased the historic San Geronimo Lodge and the Alhambra Fabrics building in Taos, said he didn’t move to the area to make money or trade in real estate, but rather, to share resources and creative solutions to problems the community faces.
“I would love to be able to grow food out here and provide those in need with it, supply schools with healthy food,” he said, adding that he intends to start a charitable nonprofit organization. “We’re trying to give to Taos, not take from it.”
“He loves it here,” Miller said, sitting on the back patio of her semi-rural new home on the southeastern edge of Taos. A local philanthropist whose wealth comes from her family’s oil and gas holdings in and around Midland, Texas, Miller is known beyond the ranching community for a variety of reasons, not least of which is her capacity to entertain diverse sets of guests at parties and dinners.
Miller said she invited Luzzatto to stay on the property for a short time before closing the sale. “And once he woke up in the morning and he saw an eagle, and he saw the beauty of living with that amount of land around you, he went bananas — I said, ‘This is Taos.’”
The Double D was one of several tracts of land parceled out of the former Kirby Ranch, Miller said, describing the old Kirby Ranch as covering between 50,000 and 60,000 acres of Taos County’s west mesa. And before that, “it was part of a land grab” that occurred in the pre-New Mexico statehood era when Spanish colonial era land grants were purchased, often in shady or outright fraudulent deals, and divvied up by powerful landowners and land speculators.
“Patrick Kirby sold a lot of it to the BLM,” Miller said, adding that the Double D was part of a larger, 6,000-acre piece of property that was divided in half. Miller’s exhusband retains a portion of the Double D property, and Gunslingers owner Mike Holley obtained a sliver of land on the northern edge of the ranch before Luzzatto bought the remaining 1,800 acres in May.
Since then, the Luzzattos have consulted with several experts on how to start restoring the land. Rancher John Adams will continue to graze between 25 and 50 cattle on the property, Luzzatto said, acknowledging that the arrangement enables him to pay property taxes at a reduced rate but emphasizing that he doesn’t “want to displace cattle that have been here for 30 years.”
“But also, we need to make sure that there’s holistic management,” he said.
As the Taos News wrapped up its interview with Miller last week, the renowned story teller offered a tantalizing last detail about her old ranch. Luzzatto didn’t just purchase a ranch, she said, he purchased land underneath which lies the source of the famous Taos Hum.
“It’s directly under the ranch house,” Miller said, explaining that her sister told her the Taos Hum was produced by shifting geologic formations within the mesa that produce noise under certain conditions.
“My sister is head of regulatory affairs for BP Amoco,” Miller said. “She said, ‘Do you hear that? That guy is right under your house.’”