This chapter reconstructs Leipzig’s political-economic story since German reunification, and the impact tenants have had on it. Following different actors through the 90s, 2000s and 2010s, I analyse how recent housing policy is “embedded in historically developed complex social relations that form the ‘context’ and a ‘corridor’ of policies and policy-making” (Brand et al. 2022, 280). I show that the terrain of struggle that sediments into housing policy in Leipzig is mediated by affective atmospheres. Like weather conditions, atmospheres exist around and between actors and institutions and have the capacity to “press on a society ‘from all sides’ with a certain force […] albeit in a way that may be only tangentially related to any subject who feels” (B. Anderson 2014). The predominant atmospheres in Leipzig are hope and depression, and they impact power relations through their specific temporality. Depression immobilizes a fragmented mass of tenants, a structurally alienated administration and the city’s indebted housing cooperation and associations, whilst different forms of hope encourage and accelerate the actions of investors, growth-oriented politicians and senior management of administrations, but also stubborn interventions by a small group of activists.