["International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nWhy do some informal neighborhoods receive public investment while others are neglected or evicted? This article addresses the inconsistent governmental responses to informal settlements in Jakarta, Indonesia, during the democratic period. State actions range from violent evictions to tolerance and community‐led improvements. These simultaneous operations of coercion, non‐intervention, and care suggest that the state's impulses in governing poverty are more heterogeneous than the literature predicts, which tends to attribute urban poor expulsions to capitalist expansion or colonial legacies. Urban poor movements have leveraged political contracts to push for pro‐poor policies, but implementation has remained uneven. Through a comparative analysis of five settlements in North Jakarta, based on field observations, interviews, and policy analysis, this research finds that the governance of informality depends on variations in community power, defined as the configuration of organizational capacity, external linkages, strategic capacity, and political embeddedness. Neighborhoods with stronger configurations across all dimensions were better able to access decision‐making arenas, align demands with elite priorities, and secure more accommodative treatment. This article reveals how discretionary authority from above intersects with power assembled from below to produce uneven outcomes within an already unequal field.\n"]