Studies have already shown that the ordeal of waiting transforms popular expectations: it presents individuals with an empty time, during which hopes are slowly reduced; it makes them live an arbitrary temporality, where they internalize a subordinate condition. This article shows that wait can also be a resource for governing the working classes, for institutions that seek not to make them accept their place, but to displace them. The result is a government of aspirations through expectations, which plays on two temporal horizons. On the one hand, it holds out the promise of a better future (elsewhere); on the other, it makes the present unbearable (here). As a result, individuals have no choice but to wait for change to come. The demonstration is based on two longitudinal ethnographies, in neighborhoods targeted by urban projects involving the departure of residents. The author looks at what happens when (apparently) nothing happens in the waiting period between the first announcements of a forthcoming move and the moment of its implementation. He describes policies that keep people on their toes for years, in anticipation of a change that could come at any moment, but is long overdue. By destining inhabitants for future mobility, these policies give impetus to a dynamic of projection that renders the present uninhabitable: by putting the management of these territories on hold, they degrade their current conditions of existence, to the point of making them uninhabitable. Symbolic and material constraints combine to create a willingness on the part of residents to leave: they come to want to leave, to put an end as quickly as possible to a wait that has become too trying, even if it means accepting departure conditions that fall far short of their expectations.