“For Now, We Are in Waiting”: Negotiating Time in Chile's Social Housing System

Abstract

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.

Navigating an Overburdened Courtroom: How Inconsistent Rules, Shadow Procedures, and Social Capital Disadvantage Tenants in Eviction Court

“…As tenants maneuver through a myriad of obstacles in their cases, they feel pressure to minimize the time spent in the courtroom. But at each step of the process, courtroom procedures impose burdens upon tenants—burdens broadly documented elsewhere in the lives of the poor as well (Auyero 2012; Koppelman 2018; Mott 2022; Purser 2012). The ambiguous courtroom procedures and inconsistent application of rules increase the amount of time spent waiting at multiple points in the process.…”

Narrating the Chilean Social Revolt through and against Stigma: The Case of Two Older Women from a Stigmatized Neighborhood

“…Stigmatized communities often deploy physical or spatial strategies involving practices such as occupation, picketing, and protesting (Sisson 2020). The marshaling of collective claims as physical strategies is more likely to result in heightened political awareness (Sisson 2020), an enhanced sense of belonging and attachment (Kirkness 2014), contestation of the denigrating state's politics of waiting (Koppelman 2018), and processes of destigmatization (Horgan 2018). As described earlier, social organization was central to countering the poor-oriented stigma targeting Chilean pobladores and to the latter's demands for recognition as citizens (Murphy 2015).…”

Desde la segregación a la exclusión residencial ¿Dónde están los nuevos hogares pobres (2000- 2017) de la ciudad de Santiago, Chile?

“…Esto puede interpretarse como un indicador indirecto de la dificultad de los hogares de bajos ingresos para acceder al suelo, incluso en estos sectores de expansión urbana reciente. A diferencia de otros países, la espera no ha sido considerada en Chile como un mecanismo sojuzgador, denigrante ni manipulador, pese a que los beneficiarios lo destacan como un dolor muy evidente, como pudimos observar en nuestras entrevistas y en el detallado trabajo de Koppelman (2018).…”