Literature on Istanbul’s transforming built and social environment mainly focuses on processes through which large-scale urban transformation projects, including earthquake-risk transformation, function as a mechanism of socio-spatial intervention in lower-income neighborhoods, and result in displacement of marginalized citizens and social movements challenging these urban policies. Moving the academic focus to the study of power and inequality from above, this research aims to display the spatial mechanisms through which urban inequality is recreated and justified by the economic and political actions of the urban elite in Istanbul. In Kadikoy’s upper-middle income neighborhoods along the Bagdat Avenue, more than 2000 buildings have been demolished and reconstructed with the aim of earthquake proofing. Such reconstruction processes in the region are invited by homeowners who call risk assessment experts to evaluate their building. Although Kadikoy is the main opposition party CHP’s stronghold and homeowners in the region raise loud opposition to the government AKP’s growth politics, demolition and reconstruction of risky buildings also offer economic gains, as property and neighborhood values increase dramatically. Considering that the earthquake risk-driven urban transformation seems inconsistent with homeowners’ political convictions, but lucrative in terms of economic gains, this research examines the politics of ambivalence among the urban elite, which I locate on the fringes of the growth coalition. This research advances the literature by complicating existing understandings of the growth politics and displaying the simultaneously occurring anti-growth discourses and pro-growth practices of the urban elite, who give license to urban growth politics, while carefully distinguishing themselves from the government’s growth coalition. Thus, this paper sheds light on the mechanisms through which the urban elite reproduces its economic and spatial capital by engaging in rent increasing activities in practice, while morally justifying these actions by resisting against structural urban change on the discourse level. Building on a year-long ethnographic research in Kadikoy, this analysis displays the mechanisms through which affluent neighborhoods maintain their affluence through persistent capital investment that enable not only preservation but also enhancement of their economic status.