Mexico's sprawling peri-urban areas face a housing crisis characterised by poorly-built, partially-abandoned developments that trap residents in precarious conditions while generating ongoing environmental harm. This paper presents speculative visions and emerging insights from an ongoing research collaboration between the University of Reading and Fundación Hogares in Zumpango, Mexico State. Drawing on Fundación Hogares' participatory methodology and their Índice de Cohesión Social Vecinal (ICSV), and situating this work within frameworks of housing decommodification (Ferreri, 2026), cosmopolitan localism (Kossoff, 2019), and caringwith practice (McAndrew et al., 2025), the paper argues that vernacular technologies and collective stewardship models offer pathways beyond the false choices that currently structure peri-urban housing policy. These are not merely technical alternatives but epistemological challenges to the dominant development paradigms that have produced — and continue to reproduce — the conditions of abandonment and vulnerability in which millions of Mexican families live.