This paper examines how investments in the built environment, in particular in “affordable” housing and real estate, are reconfiguring urban space in Addis Ababa while also producing new forms of inequality and precariousness among ordinary urban residents. By documenting the narratives of government housing officials, real estate developers and the experiences of residents in new developments, I argue that “affordable” housing and real estate are not embodiments of opposing visions of urban shelter, but complementary in enabling the marketisation and financialisation of the urban space. The developmental concern with providing home ownership for the city’s low and middle classes, the explosion of real estate investment and the expansion of the banking system via an increasing volume of mortgage financing, all contribute to seizing value and land for investments. At the same time, they also make the present more precarious for city’s residents: burdening city dwellers with indebtedness and spatial injustice and rendering their livelihoods contingent on the fragile validity of investors’ and government’s projections of growth as continuous and cumulative.