making this argument, I highlight the public sector's treatment of foreign nationals' and international organizations' real estate needs in taxation legislation, international organizations' manipulation of local tax codes and local employees, the recent real estate boom in high-quality housing, and the embeddedness of the rising middle- class's financial interests in servicing foreign nationals' quality -of-life demands. While aid dependence is not new to critical analyses of development in Mozambique (Plank, 1993; Harrison, 2002; de Renzio and Hanlon, 2007), I urban argue that these factors all contribute to producing aid's particular footprint and its related segregation from the physical realities lived in by Maputo's urban poor and low -income majority. Second - and related to the phenomenon of the growing density of aid agents - I find that because of the very readiness and volume of aid financing, relative to domestic sources of infrastructure finance, the prioritization of urban development projects is vulnerable to political economic bargaining between local authorities and external funders, as opposed to tax- bargaining between residents and local authorities. The former - namely negotiations with and dependence on foreign actors - is systematic of a self-perpetuating structural aid dependency which can hinder, as much as advance, social, political, and economic well-being. At the urban level, the concentration of international donors creates a significant, if unpredictable, source of non-tax financing for the municipal government. This reality, I argue, can spur a logic of convenience in public sector decision-making around development projects. Municipal decision- makers faced with pressing investment needs rationally choose the relatively expedient offers of external assistance over aggressively enforcing own-source revenue reforms - like the modernization of property tax valuation and collection systems - which lack a strong local political constituency and reference a problematic colonial tax legacy. However, in doing so, local authorities risk embracing an urban development agenda that is ultimately more accountable to foreign than domestic nationals. In the following sections, I first present a picture of Maputo's financial resources for urban development, ranging from its own-source revenues through to intergovernmental transfers and donor assistance at the infrastructure project level. I then provide an accounting of the rising density of international stakeholders in Mozambique and their related physical imprint on Maputo over the past two decades via a spatialized report of the growing density of high-rise luxury real estate and new gated residential developments across the city since 2000. Given the rents demanded for these types of real estate versus the median household income of Mozambicans livings in Maputo, I infer that it is largely the growing need for foreign nationals' housing and services which is being met by the real estate boom in the city. I further argue that the presence of international organizations within the city's urban core couples with the strategy of a rentier class in Maputo that receives a major - if not primary - source of income from leasing their central residences to foreigners and/or their organizations, often in foreign currency. The effect of this phenomenon translates into weak political support for the enforcement of property tax reforms which were, perhaps ironically, strongly featured among the projects funded by multilateral aid in the city. I argue that aid's urban footprint and the growing density of actors therein spurs a logic of convenience in decision-making around urban development and diminishes the potential tax bargaining powers of the wider public. A widening pool of international actors also bolster this dependence on external assistance by providing non-tax revenues in the form of aid or assistance, but also by engaging in their own schemes to avoid local tax payments. In conclusion, I contend that with low own-source revenues, municipal