Grim Repo

The suburbs, on the other hand, are as rigid as a plastic ant farm. They were a subsidized venture born of political decisions: The federal government rolled out freeways. City councillors cut deals with developers, locking in sprawl plans sometimes before they had been considered by citizens or potential homebuyers. And while boom-time buyers may have seen the symbols of neighbourhood in lawns and saplings and quiet cul-de-sacs, what they experienced was a system designed for quick returns rather than community or resilience. One of Stockton’s most prolific sprawl developers, Alex Spanos, a generous contributor to local and national political campaigns, is now the 1,014th-richest man in the world, according to Forbes. But his subdivisions have turned farmland into an inflexible matrix of mortgage traps, car dependence, and social vulnerability.

On Sunday, I ditched the Repo Bus and looked for signs of life in Weston Ranch, a twenty-year-old subdivision just off I 5. It was desolate but for a couple of moving vans carrying beds and chairs and big-screens back to San Francisco. The empty houses felt like the false fronts of a movie set. Finally I spotted a late-middle-aged man in his garage. Patrick Crouts seemed as glad to see me as I was to see him, and he invited me inside his modest rancher for a tall glass of water.

“Those three are empty,” he said, nodding out the window toward the houses across the street, “and the house beside me, too. Just a few months ago, those folks over there, a Mexican family, were practising for their daughter’s quinceañera — her fifteenth birthday party — out front. It was so beautiful. But one night they just packed up and left.”

When he arrived from Silicon Valley back in 2002, Crouts thought he was moving to a community. Now he has to pick up and recycle newspapers from the front steps of the abandoned homes that surround his, just to fool the thieves and vandals who target empty houses. Police estimate that there are ninety-odd gangs prowling Stockton’s suburbs. Crouts worries about the neighborhood kids whose parents spend three hours a day driving to and from work in the San Francisco Bay area. A sociologist, he’s been to the detention centres where so many wayward teens end up. He tells the kids left on his street to watch their language and stay away from gang colours. “Sure, Grandpa,” they tell him. Stern words can’t compete with a system perfectly designed for failure.

If this long-distance living was a set-up for social dysfunction, it also stoked the foreclosure crisis. Even Dias, whose job it was to hype suburban properties, admitted that spiking fuel costs hit Stockton as hard as rising mortgage rates. “Suddenly people went from spending $400 a month on gas to $800. They couldn’t afford to get to work anymore.” It’s worth noting that while Stockton’s older downtown neighbourhoods, which attract fewer commuters, have seen some foreclosures, they have remained viable.

However, American suburbs aren’t the only places where the raw material of community — home — has been reduced to a speculative commodity, with ominous results. As the property market boom has gone global, cities around the world are being transformed by people looking to get rich quick. I saw it this year in Dubai, where a string of instant “communities” for scores of expatriates have been laid out across the Arabian Desert. Condos are flipped several times before the backhoes even touch the sand. The people who move in find themselves lost in an archipelago of disconnected towers; they spend their days stuck in traffic, just like Stockton’s commuters. And in my hometown of Vancouver, many thousands of homes sit empty while absentee owners contemplate the market. The darkened towers in downtown neighbourhoods like Coal Harbour feel like Stockton’s desolate suburbs writ vertical.

A solution to the crisis of the hollow neighbourhood certainly must employ the power of markets. But, more fundamentally, it requires us to develop a deeper understanding of the way complex systems like cities and markets work, and how we engage with them.

Theorists at the Helsinki University of Technology’s Systems Analysis Laboratory have proposed a useful framework. Dubbed “system intelligence,” it calls for people to acknowledge that we happen to be smarter than ants. More specifically, it refers to our capacity to see that the ways we move, the ways we live, and the ways we buy affect the world far beyond our immediate vision.

To use system intelligence is to recognize the feedback loops and interdependence within systems. “[It] starts by asking the question ‘What is the system?’ But then you have to acknowledge that you are one of the agents creating it,” explained the lab’s director, Professor Raimo Hämäläinen, when I called him to discuss the Repo Bus. “These people are creating the market as individual agents, even if the system seems dictatorial,” he said. A bid on a foreclosed property is not just a market response; it is a means of tinkering with systems. For example, demand for repo homes makes banks more likely to foreclose instead of negotiating with homeowners in crisis, while every suburban home purchase encourages more sprawl on the city’s fringe. It’s all connected.

System intelligence rewards those who think and act with a view beyond the urgency of the moment. Bankers could have saved billions by considering the natural trajectory of their sub-prime mortgage party, and the repo tourists could avoid their own crisis by considering the complex reasons for suburbia’s collapse. But there is also an ethical element to the kind of thinking Hämäläinen espouses. A notion of connectedness is what leads us to recycle, or take turns when merging in traffic, or reduce our carbon footprint. In the case of real estate, it might just as powerfully lead bankers, developers, and homebuyers to let go of the urgency of the hot deal. First they would have to admit that we are engaging not just in a market system, but in a system of urbanism, of community development, and — not to put too fine a point on it — of civilization.