Many of my rough sleeping informants were competing for surface-space on the hot air vents emanating heat around Paris’ Gare du Nord. Based on two years of ethnographic research, I will in this paper demonstrate how my informants ordered the space around the vents, and made (temporary) homes in a process I call habiter. Conflicts both internally, with security forces and ultimately with hostile architecture rendered this process perpetually cyclical. My observations from Paris are indicative of deep fault lines in the make-up of the city space of many metropolis but they also allow us to conceptualise the agency of homeless people within these spaces and take them and their action more seriously.