Chapter 6 follows the political implications of slum residents’ positive identifications with private property, charting how the world-class aesthetic and the restructuring of Delhi’s economy created the structural and symbolic conditions out of which private property emerged as an exalted target and fetishized object. Focusing on residents’ experience of being alienated from the labor process, it examines how land, particularly private property, took on fantastical qualities in residents’ narratives, mobilizing new urban imaginaries and inhering the power to magically transform both self and city. Efforts to conjure a mental image of a better future through the lens of property ownership were simultaneously efforts to align oneself with the speculative promises of world-class development: to index propriety to property, rendering property a vehicle of upward mobility. While chapter 5 points to the openings for the aesthetic reappropriation of dominant norms, this chapter addresses how quickly economic uncertainty can close those openings.