This paper explores the ways in which a new form of urban transformation takes place in Istanbul’s upper-middle income neighborhoods, where urban rent is increasing through demolition and reconstruction of residential buildings with the aim of earthquake proofing. More specifically, this paper focuses on the experience of this transformation among doormen as an occupational group, most of whom are migrants from Anatolia and live rent-free in the basement floors with their families in return of their minimum-wage paying work serving as building superintendents. In the recent wave of urban transformation, while the homeowners receive rent support during the period of reconstruction and are relocated back to their renewed buildings, the doormen face displacement and unemployment, as the new apartment managements prefer to outsource security and cleaning services to private companies. Despite a growing body of urban literature on transformation and gentrification in Istanbul, there has been little empirical work on the experience of transformation in residential upper-middle income neighborhoods. Aiming to shift focus to a rather overlooked form of displacement in Istanbul, this paper illustrates the peripheral position of the doormen within central Istanbul. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews with doormen in Istanbul, this paper displays spatial exclusion of an occupational group from central urban geographies through new forms of transformation that reproduce poverty and displacement. Urban transformation, from which homeowners and contractors jointly profit and prosper, impacts doormen as an occupational group adversely: Doormen’s precarious position is defined through attachment of their labor to their homes. Doormen face the risk to lose their jobs and thus homes, are not offered any safety, they are pushed further into the peripheries of the labor market, of the city, or even of the country as they no longer can afford to live in Istanbul with a minimum wage and hence move back to their villages in Anatolia.