Remember Apple’s slogan “There’s an app for that”? It was launched in 2009, marking a new era in which your “smartphone” was going to help you. It wasn’t going to drown you in an insatiable need for more stimulus. It wasn’t going to be the undoing of your conspiracy-prone uncle, threaten your data privacy, or cause any kind of addiction. Of course not, how absurd! Apple’s slogan was so ubiquitous that they trademarked it and watched as we all hitched our wagons to the tech world’s self-concept: that apps can do everything.
To this day, apps often make the promise that they’re solving a problem. In fact, I’ve never seen an app come out and say, “We’re adding to a problem.” But since the halcyon days of 2009, I think we all know that many of them are, in fact, adding to a problem. Some of them are doing it unwittingly; others knowingly, driven by a short-term profit motive. Some are out to shake up the fundamental way we do things with the (arrogant) assumption that they know what’s best.
Enter Oyssey, a new real estate app that purports to be a “real estate search management platform.” What caught my attention is a feature that allows homebuyers to see the political leanings of their potential neighbors. The app can also tell you all sorts of demographic information about those neighbors, like their income, age, education level, and even the extent of their dog population.
On the surface, those features seem . . . useful. I get it. You want to buy a home near neighbors you’ll get along with. Maybe you’re not comfortable being surrounded by people who vote differently than you, or who have an alarming number of Shiba Inus. (These are the most cat-like dogs. Who wants that?)
But if we think about it for an additional beat, it reinforces an obstacle rather than solving it. First, we already have similar people living in the same neighborhood. The metric around which they cohere tends to be wealth. That metric has delivered, among other things, a lopsided educational system in which schools in wealthier districts receive more funding than schools in less wealthy districts. This has been reported on forever. It’s one of the country’s most persistent stains. Why can’t children get equivalent levels of support in school no matter where they live? You even hear real estate characters in movies say, “The schools in this neighborhood are great,” which is simply code for, “You guys all have money, so relax.” So, clearly, rich people already know who’s living in those big, beautiful homes next to the best schools, no app required.
People use other demographics to self-segregate as well, such as race, ethnicity, and religion. Sure, some neighborhoods organically form based on these metrics; ever run into a bushel of Iranians in the Westwood enclave of Los Angeles? Or Hasidic Jews in New York City’s Williamsburg neighborhood? Sometimes, though, these neighborhoods form because of redlining and other far more sinister policies that have historically created economically coerced cohabitation. We did technically decide as a society that we don’t like segregation. (See the 1960s.)
Beyond the fact that we don’t seem to need any kind of technical assistance with picking neighborhoods that already reflect us, we’ve also seen from the last ten years that polarization is a real buzzkill, and that cementing it by curating a perfect bubble of proximate dwellers only deepens the problem.
I don’t mean to pick on any single app. But it seems like a sign of the times that such an app even exists. It calls out the problem while presenting it as an ideal, and then offers a way for us to dig in our heels.
Instead, we should be seeking mixed-income neighborhoods; a chance to meet people unlike ourselves; neighborhoods that reflect the melting pot or salad or stew that this country has been known for. If we lean too hard into apps that only reinforce our self-selected clusters, the bubbles we all live in quickly become concrete walls.