Not enough time: temporalities of displacement and affordability in Addis Ababa’s housing programmes

One of the most remarkable examples of a global trend towards ownership-centred state housing programmes is found in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. However, many eligible households have remained living outside their allocated condominiums. They rent them out to ‘buy time’ to afford and sustain decent and secure housing futures within or outside of their units. Therefore, time appears as a crucial resource to bridge affordability gaps, often neglected in literature on state housing. We expand the literature on downward-raiding and affordable housing by using a broader biographic and time-sensitive perspective to understand how relationships between housing recipients and their distant assets shift over time in relation to wider spatial policies. In Addis Ababa, violent urban renewal cuts the time resources of distant homeowners, rendering them more ‘displaceable’. Against this background, state housing is drifting away from its objective to facilitate access to homeownership, transforming into an increasingly unaffordable resettlement scheme with time-lagged displacement.