Waiting for low‐income housing is an increasingly common experience of the urban poor in both the global North and South, although little attention has been paid to its effects. Engaging a growing literature on time in systems of social provision, this article presents an ethnographic case study of waiting among poor housing‐seekers in a peripheral district of Santiago, Chile. While illustrating how waiting is produced by state policies and practices that position homeless city‐dwellers as passive clients, it challenges existing studies that argue that waiting produces durable submission to dominant state projects. In contrast, it shows that housing‐seekers in Santiago actively negotiated a denigrating temporality of state provision through multiple practices, including collective contestation of arbitrary delays. By dissecting the conditions that enabled contentious responses to waiting for housing in Chile, this article aims to elucidate how such temporal contestation may emerge (or be precluded) in other contexts.

Since Chile’s transition to an electoral regime in 1990, the demobilization of local organizations in Santiago’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, known as poblaciones, presents a puzzle, given the continuation of the neoliberal socioeconomic program that urban popular sectors mobilized against under the dictatorship. Ethnographic and interview data from two districts in southern Santiago reveal that the posttransition period has been characterized by increased state domination of local organizations in Santiago’s poor communities. By virtue of their dependence on material resources, local organizations have become extensions of the local state, engaged in service provision rather than contentious claims making. At the same time, the extension of state control has been masked through reinforcement in official discourse of the symbolic boundaries between state and society. This shifting and blurring of the state–civil-society boundary contributes to the deepening of the political demobilization of popular organizations. Desde la transición a un régimen electoral en Chile en 1990, la desmovilización de las organizaciones locales en los vecindarios pobres y de clase trabajadora de Santiago, conocidos como poblaciones, presenta un enigma, dada la continuación del programa socioeconómico neoliberal contra el cual los sectores urbanos populares se movilizaron durante la dictadura. Algunos datos etnográficos y de entrevistas recogidos en dos distritos del sur de Santiago revelan que el periodo posterior a la transición se ha caracterizado por un aumento en el control del Estado sobre las organizaciones locales en las comunidades pobres de Santiago. Debido a su dependencia de los recursos materiales, las organizaciones locales se han convertido en extensiones del estado local, dedicadas a la prestación de servicios en lugar de luchar por las reinvindicaciones de la comunidad. Al mismo tiempo, la ampliación del control estatal ha sido disfrazada por el fortalecimiento de las fronteras simbólicas entre el estado y la sociedad en el discurso oficial. Esta estrategia contribuye a profundizar la desmovilización política de las organizaciones populares.

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Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) program was touted as a “pro-female” policy to promote women’s autonomy and empowerment through subsidized homeownership. However, its design and discourse constructed motherhood as the primary basis of women’s inclusion. This article examines the gendered effects of a maternalist housing program through ethnographic research in São Paulo, looking at both movement organizations using MCMV to provide housing for members, and everyday life among residents in an MCMV-subsidized housing complex. It finds that while many women felt empowered by inclusion in MCMV, the program also produced gendered exclusions and reinforced unequal gendered burdens. First, it selectively prioritized low-income mothers while excluding other groups of women as undeserving “single people.” Second, it primed beneficiaries to view state-subsidized housing as conditioned upon their responsibility for home and family, expanding maternal obligations to include the financial management of homeownership without easing gendered burdens of care.

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