While conveying the particular case of a family’s harassment by a real estate company in Valparaíso, Chile, this paper aims to outline the structuration of real estate predatory practices as a public issue at the municipal level. This article analyzes urban conflicts – spatial controversies – in the several arenas in which they take shape (the press, municipal commissions, public spaces). Bridging the gap, from local and daily experiences to the national scale thus makes it necessary to dismiss linear explanations which too often set aside the actors strategy to make their struggles visible. The way in which spatial controversies shape the local political debate, provoking an institutional crisis through the municipal elections in 2016, illustrates the magnitude of these conflicts, from the territorial to the institutional sphere.