This article contributes to research on reconfiguration of social and private in socialist cities. It presents the case study of Mitrovica, a smaller and peripheral city in Socialist Yugoslavia, to compensate for the focus on big capital cities and socialist new towns in the literature. The article explores local decision-making processes leading to the upgrading of informal private housing and the parallel downgrading of social-sector housing between the 1960s and 1980s. It demonstrates the open-ended nature of socialist urban development as the processual outcome of negotiations between local actors involved in urban planning and housing strategies of individual residents within the structural framework of central-level housing policies and under-urbanization. The article argues that the individualizing discourse of urban modernity was integral to post-Second World War socialist urban development.