Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which housing bureaucracy, and its legal and policy processes, have incrementally rendered residents of Eastridge, Cape Town as illegal occupants of their homes of over two decades.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we explore the ways in which residents of Eastridge, a neighbourhood in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town, have been termed as 'unlawful' occupants of their homes of over two decades, through complex and shifting operations of the housing bureaucracy. Drawing on a research project completed in collaboration with the Eastridge Housing Committee and the Western-Cape Anti Eviction Campaign, we trace the small and large, the banal and obscure, the political and intimate, policy and legal processes which intertwine to dispossess residents of their right to live in these homes and place them in a situation of prolonged precarity. Through archival work and interviews with residents and housing agents, we examine this encounter with housing policy, its lived realities, and the emotions that these residents navigate: from hope to despair, from confusion to a determined anger to retain their homes. The paper reflects on both the structural violence of bureaucracy and its relationship to the right to housing, as well as the administrative and political constraints to housing agencies' actions, thus complicating a more conventional understanding of citizen-state encounters.