This comment was made by Pak Suro, a resident of a rental social housing (rumah susun sederhana sewa, rusunawa) unit in Jakarta. The government evicted him, his wife, two small children and an ailing parent from their kampung (low-income self-built urban neighbourhood) in 2016. After a few months of living in a makeshift tent among the rubble of his and his neighbours’ homes, he reluctantly agreed to relocate to a unit in a rusunawa some 20 kilometres away. Witnessing his parent's deteriorating health and his daughter's frequent bouts of pneumonia caused by living amid the dust and debris near the ruins of their former home had become too much. Yet, instead of rebuilding a new life in the rusunawa, Pak Suro felt deprived. He felt he had become poorer, but what he lamented most was the precarity of his new life. For Pak Suro, as for many other residents after their kampung is demolished, a rusunawa is not, and cannot be, a home.

Rusunawa emerged into the public debate amid the intense period of kampung evictions that occurred in Jakarta during 2013–2017 under the combined leadership of Joko Widodo (governor of Jakarta in 2012–2014, president of Indonesia 2014–2024) and his deputy, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama or Ahok, who himself later became governor in 2014–2017, with Djarot Saiful Hidayat as his deputy. In total, Jakarta's Legal Aid Institute (Lembaga Bantuan Hukum, LBH) documented around 495 cases of kampung evictions, displacing 15,319 households, from 2015 to 2018 (LBH Jakarta 2016a, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). While this chapter focuses on rusunawa as a housing alternative provided to evicted residents, it should be noted that government policy intends rusunawa primarily to benefit lowerincome urban households more generally.