Ethiopia is one of the fastest urbanizing countries in the world with a government urgently struggling to find coping strategies for a rapidly growing urban population. Eighty percent of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, is by convention considered a “slum” with problems of overcrowding, bad sanitation, and dilapidated housing. Concurrently, Addis Ababa offers a unique insight into an indigenous urban tissue that was not shaped by colonization and modernist city models but by its own history and culture. In order to address the housing question, the Ethiopian government set up a mass housing program aiming to replace all informal housing but leaving the urban poor behind. Drawing upon literature from Ethiopia and the world as well as from several disciplines, this paper reflects the ten-year running Ethiopian mass housing program against the background of the Addis Ababa’s housing crisis. The author argues that the indigenous urban tissue of Addis Ababa is key to developing future housing schemes that are not only relevant but also resilient.