In the otherwise unwatchable 2005 film Fun With Dick and Jane actors Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni watch in dismay as their front lawn is repossessed. The turf is literally peeled off the surface of the earth, rolled up like wallpaper and carted away in the back of a pick-up truck. The natural landscape of their suburban world is revealed as very literally superficial. It is not a landscape at all, you could say, but a commercial product whose lifespan has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with affordability. The couple has fallen behind on their payments so their prosthetic terrain is taken away. ‘Not everybody could afford a landscape like that, eh?’ says Hector, the gardener, as he packs an armful of turf into his truck. Not everybody, indeed.

I’m reminded of an article by Charles Montgomery from the October/November 2008 issue of The Walrus. On a visit to Stockton, California, a town particularly hard-hit by foreclosures, Montgomery stumbled upon a bizarre growth industry: painting the dead lawns of foreclosed homes green using athletic turf dyes. ‘It seemed fitting that realtors in Stockton should consider it normal to paint these lawns green’, he explained to me by email. ‘It was only the appearance of vitality that mattered. Homes that looked palatial from the street were fragile inside: thin walls, cheap lights, shelves pinned to cardboardthin drywall. Everything about Stockton’s suburbs felt temporary, as though the place was a movie set – built to be consumed and abandoned.’

Of course, foreclosures in the US continue to accumulate with no genuine end in sight. Whole suburban developments that everyone expected to be booming have now been reduced to ghost towns. Lawns are drying up, if not repossessed outright; pools are turning green with algae or simply evaporating to form illegal skate parks; garages sit empty; upstairs bedrooms have fallen silent. In some cases wild animals have actually begun to colonize the derelict homes, like some avant-garde backdrop designed for a particularly exotic zoo. Mountain lions sleep atop uninhabited ranches, sunning themselves on pinewood decking.

This is the spatial residuum of the financial crisis. Like a modern-day Pompeii, it is a geography of collapse – in this case, an immersive archaeological site distributed nationwide.

Yet we mustn’t forget that these foreclosures did not begin today. In the mid-1990s, for instance, photographer Todd Hido had already begun to document repossessed homes in the greater Los Angeles area. These houses, forcibly abandoned and emptied of not quite all their contents, were sealed behind locked doors and left to accumulate dust. However those locked doors included coded lock-boxes containing keys, which Hido figured out how to access. He and a realtor friend discovered that the codes were nothing more complex than an abbreviation or anagram of the name of the bank that foreclosed on the property. ‘Home Savings of America was HSA’, Hido pointed out in a telephone interview. Enter that code and you can enter the building. ‘You could always tell what bank it was by the signs in front of the houses. I probably made it into forty or fifty of them that way and then I started taking pictures.’

When asked what he hoped to find Hido replied: ‘I was definitely more interested in the ones that weren’t cleaned up. A lot of times somebody would come in and wipe the place clean, but I concentrated on the simple little marks and the simple little traces left behind. You could tell where pictures had been hung, for instance, as if there were still stories on the walls themselves.’

The photos he produced are an odd kind of spatial portraiture: the inner lives of abandoned buildings. It’s as if we’ve come across some little-known burial practice in which 21st century homeowners have been entombed with none of their possessions. They are antechambers to the afterlife of the American Dream. In sheer volume alone our living rooms now far outweigh the pyramids: for every stone tomb in the world there are a thousand unused dens full of cat hair and dust. For every cemetery there is a dead lawn in Stockton. Take away the possessions and the electric lights and perhaps it is not a landscape meant for the living at all: the suburbs become a giant sepulcher.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing here, then, is to realize how mundane it will be when the world really does fall apart. It won’t be all fires and riots and warfare, but empty dining rooms and leaking sinks. Perhaps the only things we’ll leave behind are some carpet squares, maybe a broken lamp, perhaps some loose thumbtacks on the garage floor. So much for the monumental. Hido’s photos are all the more bleak for being so ordinary. There are stained rugs and scuff marks, old mattresses, weak afternoon sunlight filtered through cheap drapes and oil stains on concrete. Perhaps it’s much worse to realize that there isn’t some apotheosis of the suburban landscape on the way, a geographic rapture that will complete – and finally justify – our built environment.

There is no moment in the end when it will all make sense. We’ll evacuate a world we hardly knew, a purgatory of broken drywall and reclaimed lawns constructed by ancestors we will pretend not to understand.