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In Kenya, certain urban estates in Nairobi and Mombasa have been cast as spaces of radicalization, recruitment into terrorist networks, and threats or attacks by terrorist groups. The deliberate construction of these estates as territories of urban insecurities is a phenomenon in which local and international Non-Governmental Organizations, donor agencies, and private and public security apparatuses play an essential role through their softer counter-terrorism strategies popularly called Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). Taking Nairobi’s Majengo as an example, this article interrogates how the history of this suburb and its current representation as a hotspot of “terror” is entrenched in segregative colonial urban planning, indigenous displacement, and its eventual rise as a prostitution den, urban gang violence, and destitution long before (the war on) terrorism came to Kenya in the 1990s. It explores how the media and institutional actors have created and sustained the narrative of terror. It finally interrogates how the so-called suspect populations residing in these estates renegotiate and imagine their everyday spaces and lives with regards to the CVE industry and the ways it constructs their homes and neighborhoods as hotbeds of terror.