Sorry, but most desert land is pretty “useless”. You can’t grow crops, it’s far from metropolitan centers, it’s hot. Unless there is buried oil like in Saudi Arabia, or near a major city (eg Phoenix, Vegas), the land itself is pretty “useless” in a resource extraction sense. Even solar panels need to be relatively close to a substation that can handle it.

That said, the desert can still be beautiful to those the live there, and spiritual to native Americans with history there.

So the desert is interesting and cool, but not necessarily lucrative.