This chapter explores the role of housing activism in promoting innovative forms of housing governance. While mass-housing policies in Brazil have been largely focused on government-led urban renewal, such as slum upgrading and the regeneration of informal settlements, community-based housing programs of self-management (autogestão) started being implemented from 2008 on, culminating in the national urban housing program for community associations, My House, My Life - Entities (Minha Casa, Minha Vida - Entidades or MCMV-E). In this chapter, I focus on the factors and historical events that led to the inclusion of housing self-management as a federal housing policy and the central role played by housing advocates in the creation and execution of this policy. To this end, I use an in-depth within-case study method and process tracing analysis, in order to track the causal mechanisms that produced changes in housing policy at the federal level. The question I explore is what causal mechanisms link causes and outcomes in housing policy. The findings in this chapter contribute to the studies on the consequences of social movements and to recent literature on process-tracing-based research design.