There was little airspace for this kind of talk on the Repo Bus, despite Cesar Dias’s convenient moralizing. In the frantic universe of buy and flip, every bad was a potential good. I remember the moment at the end of the tour when we filed into a garage-fronted bungalow in Spanos Park East. A sea of shattered glass sparkled on the parlour floor. Apparently someone had broken in and put a boot to the gas fireplace.

“Uh-oh,” said Dias.

“Vámonos!” said Jorge Espino.

But Sarah Lane saw opportunity in those shards. “This is a huge break!” she enthused.

“All these places are going to fall apart in twenty years anyway,” Terry Lane said with a laugh as we filed out.

Down the street, Dias was fussing over the state of a front lawn. It was just the kind of lawn the Lanes look for: unkempt, unwatered, unloved.

“The bank should have come by and sprayed this,” he said.

“You mean watered it? ” I asked.

“No, sprayed it green. Painted it,” he said, as though it was obvious that the suburbs only needed to keep up appearances until the next round of sales.

“Someone really should call the city.”