Reflecting global shifts toward privatization in social housing policies, many Latin American states have adopted the “demand-subsidy” model of state-funded but developer-led provision. While critical urbanists have shown that demand-subsidy programs consistently produce segregated, low-quality housing, this article uses comparative ethnography to examine how beneficiaries experience and contest them in different urban political contexts. The study takes a sequential approach to comparison. Beginning with an ethnographic case study of housing struggles in Santiago, Chile—the birthplace of the demand-subsidy model—the research was later expanded comparatively by following the model to São Paulo, Brazil, where it was implemented under different political conditions. The comparison reveals that popular housing organizations in both cities engaged in “contentious participation,” using confrontational protest to claim participatory voice in otherwise top-down, developer-led programs. This took different local forms as similar claims were refracted through distinct state-civil society regimes. In Santiago, a history of technocratic governance and movement demobilization left housing-seekers to organize in state-sanctioned committees and wage fragmented struggles for ad hoc participation in individual housing projects. In São Paulo, where the demand-subsidy model broke with a local history of participatory governance, consolidated networks of housing movements used mass mobilization to claim institutionalized participation in federal policy.
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