SEOUL — For a lot of Individuals, the house the place 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-hee lives could be the stuff of nightmares.
Situated simply exterior the capital of Seoul, the constructing isn’t very tall — simply 16 tales — by South Korean requirements, however the advanced consists of 36 separate constructions, that are almost an identical aside from the constructing quantity displayed on their sides.
The two,000-plus models are available in the identical standardized dimensions discovered all over the place within the nation (Lee lives in a “84C,” which has 84 sq. meters, or about 900 sq. ft, of ground area) and provide, in some methods, a ready-made life. The facilities scattered all through the campus embody a rock backyard with a pretend waterfall, a playground, a fitness center, an administration workplace, a senior middle and a “mothers cafe.”
However this, for probably the most half, is South Korea’s middle-class dream of homeownership — its model of a home with the white picket fence.
“The larger the house advanced, the higher the encircling infrastructure, like public transportation, faculties, hospitals, grocery tales, parks and so forth,” Lee stated. “I like how straightforward it’s to speak with the neighbors within the advanced as a result of there’s a well-run on-line neighborhood.”
Residence blocks are the predominant housing format in Seoul.
(Common Photographs Group through Getty Photographs)
Most within the nation would agree: Right now, 64% of South Korean households stay in such multifamily housing, the vast majority of them in flats with 5 or extra tales.
Such a actuality appears unimaginable in cities like Los Angeles, which has restricted or prohibited the development of dense housing in single-family zones.
“Los Angeles is usually seen as an limitless tableau of particular person homes, every with their very own yard and backyard,” Max Podemski, an L.A.-based city planner, wrote in The Instances final 12 months. “Residence buildings are anathema to the town’s ethos.”
In recent times, the value of that ethos has grow to be more and more obvious within the type of a extreme housing scarcity. Within the metropolis of Los Angeles, the place almost 75% of all residential land is zoned for stand-alone single-family properties, rents have been in a seemingly limitless ascent, contributing to one of many worst homelessness crises within the nation. As a treatment, the state of California has ordered the development of greater than 450,000 new housing models by 2029.
The plan will virtually definitely require the constructing of some type of apartment-style housing, however development has lagged amid fierce resistance.
Sixty years in the past, South Korea stood at the same crossroads. However the sequence of city housing insurance policies it applied led to the primacy of the house, and in doing so, remodeled South Korean notions of housing over the course of a single era.
The outcomes of that program have been combined. However in a single vital respect, not less than, it has been profitable: Seoul, which is half the scale of the town of L.A., is house to a inhabitants of 9.6 million — in contrast with the estimated 3.3 million individuals who stay right here.
For Lee, the trade-off is a worthwhile one.
In an excellent world, she would have a storage for the form of storage gross sales she’s admired in American films. “However South Korea is a small nation,” she stated. “It’s crucial to make use of area as effectively as attainable.”
Flats, in her view, have spared her from the miseries of suburban housing. Eating places and shops are shut by. Quick access to public transportation means she doesn’t want a automobile to get all over the place.
“Perhaps it’s due to my Korean must have every thing completed shortly, however I feel it’d be uncomfortable to stay someplace that doesn’t have these items inside attain always,” she stated. “I wish to exit at night time; I feel it will be boring to have all of the lights go off at 9 p.m.”
A basic view reveals steam rising from workplace and house buildings that outline the Seoul skyline. (Ed Jones / AFP through Getty Photographs)
Residence buildings mild up within the night as individuals return house from work in Seoul on March 25, 2021. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
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Flats first started showing in South Korea within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, as a part of a authorities response to a housing disaster within the nation’s capital — a byproduct of the period’s fast industrialization and subsequent city inhabitants increase.
Within the Nineteen Sixties, single-family indifferent dwellings made up round 95% of properties within the nation. However over the next decade, as rural migrants flooded Seoul searching for manufacturing unit work, doubling the inhabitants from 2.4 to five.5 million, many on this new city working class discovered themselves with out properties. Because of this, a lot of them settled in shantytowns on the town’s outskirts, dwelling in makeshift sheet-metal properties.
The authoritarian authorities on the time, led by a former military basic named Park Chung-hee, declared flats to be the answer and launched into a constructing spree that will proceed below subsequent administrations. Eased peak restrictions and incentives for development firms helped add between 20,000 to 100,000 new house models yearly.
They had been pushed by political leaders in South Korea as a high-tech modernist paradise, quickly making them probably the most fascinating type of housing for the center and higher lessons. Generally known as apateu, which particularly refers to a high-rise house constructing constructed as half of a bigger advanced — as distinct from decrease stand-alone buildings — they symbolized Western cachet and upward social mobility.
“Across the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, virtually each big-name movie star on the time appeared in house commercials,” recalled Jung Heon-mok, an anthropologist on the Academy of Korean Research who has studied the historical past of South Korean flats. “However the greatest cause that flats proliferated as they did was as a result of they had been completed at scale, in complexes of 5 buildings or extra.”
Important to the trendy apateu are the facilities — reminiscent of on-site kindergartens or comfort shops — that enable them to operate like miniature cities. This has additionally turned them into branded commodities and sophistication signifiers, constructed by development conglomerates like Samsung, and taking up names like “fortress” or “palace.” (One of many first such branded house complexes was Trump Tower, a luxurious improvement in-built Seoul within the late Nineteen Nineties by a development agency that licensed the identify of Donald Trump.)
All of this has made the indifferent single-family house, for probably the most half, out of date. In Seoul, such properties now make up simply 10% of the housing inventory. Amongst many youthful South Koreans like Lee, they’re related to retirement within the countryside, or, as she places it: for “grilling within the backyard on your grandkids.”
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This mannequin has not been with out issues.
There are the same old points that include dense housing. In buildings with poor soundproofing, “inter-floor noise” between models is such a common scourge that the federal government runs a noise-related dispute decision middle whereas discouraging individuals from angrily confronting their neighbors, a state of affairs that often escalates into headline-making violence.
Some house buildings have proved to be an excessive amount of even for a rustic accustomed to unsentimentally environment friendly types of housing. One 19-story, 4,635-unit advanced constructed by a big-name house model in one of many wealthiest areas of Seoul seems so oppressive that it has grow to be a curiosity, mocked by some as a jail or rooster coop.
Residence complexes in Seoul on Oct. 5, 2024. Flats first started showing in South Korea in Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, as a part of a authorities response to a housing disaster within the nation’s capital.
(Tina Hsu / Bloomberg through Getty Photographs)
The sheer variety of flats has prompted criticism of Seoul’s skyline as sterile and ugly. South Koreans have described its uniform, rectangular columns as “matchboxes.” And regardless of the aspirations connected to them, there’s additionally a wariness a few tradition the place properties are in-built such disposable, meeting line-like trend.
Many individuals listed below are more and more questioning how this type of housing, with its almost an identical layouts, has formed the disposition of latest South Korean society, usually criticized by its personal members as overly homogenized and lockstep.
“I’m involved that flats have made South Koreans’ life too comparable,” stated Maing Pil-soo, an architect and concrete planning professor at Seoul Nationwide College. “And with comparable life, you find yourself with the same mind-set. Very similar to the cityscape itself, every thing turns into flattened and uniform.”
Jung, the anthropologist, believes South Korea’s house complexes, with their promise of an atomized, frictionless life, have eroded the extra expansive social bonds that outlined conventional society — like those who prolonged throughout complete villages — making its inhabitants extra individualistic and insular.
“On the finish of the day, flats listed below are undoubtedly extraordinarily handy — that’s why they turned so common,” he stated. “However a part of that comfort is as a result of they insulate you from the issues of the broader world. When you’re inside your advanced and in your house, you don’t have to concentrate to your neighbors or their points.”
Nonetheless, Jung says this uniformity isn’t all unhealthy. It’s what made them such simply scalable options to the housing disaster of many years previous. It’s also, in some methods, an equalizing power.
“I feel flats are partly why sure forms of social inequalities you see within the U.S. are comparatively much less extreme in South Korea,” he stated.
Although many branded house complexes now resemble gated communities with exclusionary home-owner associations, Jung factors out that on the entire, the dominance of multifamily housing has inadvertently inspired extra social mixing between lessons, a bodily closeness that creates the sense that everybody is inhabiting the identical broader area.
Even Seoul’s wealthiest neighborhoods really feel, to an extent that’s laborious to see in lots of American cities, porous and accessible. Wealthier usually means having a nicer house, however an house all the identical, present in the identical environs as these in a special worth vary.
“And despite the fact that we often use disparaging phrases like ‘rooster coop’ to explain them, when you truly step inside a kind of flats, they don’t really feel like that in any respect,” Jung stated. “They are surely fairly comfy and good.”
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Folks pose for images amongst a discipline of cosmos flowers in entrance of high-rise house buildings in Goyang, west of Seoul. (Ed Jones / AFP through Getty Photographs)
None of this, nonetheless, has been in a position to stave off Seoul’s personal present-day housing affordability disaster.
The capital has one of the crucial costly house costs on this planet on a price-per-square-meter foundation, rating fourth after Hong Kong, Zurich and Singapore, and forward of main U.S. cities like New York or San Francisco, in response to a report revealed final month by Deutsche Financial institution. One particularly brutal stretch not too long ago noticed house costs in Seoul double in 4 years.
A part of the rationale for that is that flats, with their standardized dimensions, have successfully grow to be interchangeable monetary commodities: An house in Seoul is seen as a way more surefire guess than any inventory, resulting in intense actual property funding and hypothesis that has pushed up house costs.
“Shopping for an house right here isn’t simply shopping for an house. The equal within the U.S. can be like shopping for an excellent single-family house with a storage within the U.S., besides that it comes with a bunch of NVIDIA shares,” stated Chae Sang-wook, an impartial actual property analyst. “In South Korea, individuals put money into apateu for capital good points, not money move from lease.”
Some specialists predict that, because the nation enters one other period of demographic upheaval, the dominance of flats will sometime be no extra.
If births proceed to fall as dramatically as they’ve completed lately, South Koreans might now not want such dense housing. The continuing rise of single-person households, too, might chip away at a type of housing constructed to carry four-person nuclear households.
However Chae is skeptical that this may occur anytime quickly. He factors out that South Koreans don’t even wish to assemble their very own furnishings, not to mention repair their very own vehicles — all downstream results of ubiquitous house dwelling.
“For now, there isn’t a various apart from this,” he stated. “As a South Korean, you don’t have the luxurious of selecting.”
