SEOUL — For a lot of Individuals, the house the place 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-hee lives may be the stuff of nightmares.
Positioned 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 buildings, 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 in every single place within the nation (Lee lives in a “84C,” which has 84 sq. meters, or about 900 sq. toes, of flooring 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 health club, an administration workplace, a senior middle and a “mothers cafe.”
However this, for essentially 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, colleges, 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.”
Condominium blocks are the predominant housing format in Seoul.
(Common Pictures Group by way of Getty Pictures)
Most within the nation would agree: As we speak, 64% of South Korean households stay in such multifamily housing, nearly all 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 countless tableau of particular person homes, every with their very own yard and backyard,” Max Podemski, an L.A.-based city planner, wrote in The Occasions final 12 months. “Condominium buildings are anathema to town’s ethos.”
Lately, the value of that ethos has turn out 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 countless 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 actually 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 an identical crossroads. However the collection of city housing insurance policies it carried out led to the primacy of the house, and in doing so, remodeled South Korean notions of housing over the course of a single technology.
The outcomes of that program have been blended. However in a single necessary respect, at the least, it has been profitable: Seoul, which is half the dimensions of town of L.A., is dwelling 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 a great world, she would have a storage for the type of storage gross sales she’s admired in American films. “However South Korea is a small nation,” she stated. “It’s vital to make use of area as effectively as potential.”
Residences, 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 in every single place.
“Possibly it’s due to my Korean must have all the things performed rapidly, however I feel it’d be uncomfortable to stay someplace that doesn’t have this stuff inside attain always,” she stated. “I prefer to exit at night time; I feel it could 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 by way of Getty Pictures)
Condominium buildings mild up within the night as folks return dwelling from work in Seoul on March 25, 2021. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Occasions)
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Residences first started showing in South Korea within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, as a part of a authorities response to a housing disaster within the nation’s capital — a byproduct of the period’s speedy industrialization and subsequent city inhabitants growth.
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 facility 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 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 underneath subsequent administrations. Eased top restrictions and incentives for development firms helped add between 20,000 to 100,000 new house models yearly.
They have been pushed by political leaders in South Korea as a high-tech modernist paradise, quickly making them essentially the most fascinating type of housing for the center and higher lessons. Often 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 largest motive that flats proliferated as they did was as a result of they have been performed at scale, in complexes of 5 buildings or extra.”
Important to the fashionable 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 over names like “fort” or “palace.” (One of many first such branded house complexes was Trump Tower, a luxurious growth inbuilt 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 dwelling, for essentially 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 to your grandkids.”
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This mannequin has not been with out issues.
There are the standard 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 folks from angrily confronting their neighbors, a scenario 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 turn out to be a curiosity, mocked by some as a jail or hen coop.
Condominium complexes in Seoul on Oct. 5, 2024. Residences first started showing in South Korea in Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, as a part of a authorities response to a housing disaster within the nation’s capital.
(Tina Hsu / Bloomberg by way of Getty Pictures)
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 may be additionally a wariness a few tradition the place properties are inbuilt such disposable, meeting line-like style.
Many individuals listed here are more and more questioning how this type of housing, with its almost an identical layouts, has formed the disposition of up to date South Korean society, usually criticized by its personal members as overly homogenized and lockstep.
“I’m involved that flats have made South Koreans’ existence too related,” stated Maing Pil-soo, an architect and concrete planning professor at Seoul Nationwide College. “And with related existence, you find yourself with an identical mind-set. Very similar to the cityscape itself, all the things 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 total villages — making its inhabitants extra individualistic and insular.
“On the finish of the day, flats listed here are undoubtedly extraordinarily handy — that’s why they grew to become so standard,” 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 dangerous. 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 pressure.
“I feel flats are partly why sure varieties 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 onerous 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 though we often use disparaging phrases like ‘hen coop’ to explain them, when you really step inside a type of flats, they don’t really feel like that in any respect,” Jung stated. “They are surely fairly snug and good.”
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Individuals pose for images amongst a discipline of cosmos flowers in entrance of high-rise house buildings in Goyang, west of Seoul. (Ed Jones / AFP by way of Getty Pictures)
None of this, nevertheless, has been capable of stave off Seoul’s personal present-day housing affordability disaster.
The capital has some of the 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 printed 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 turn out to be interchangeable monetary commodities: An house in Seoul is seen as a way more surefire wager than any inventory, resulting in intense actual property funding and hypothesis that has pushed up dwelling costs.
“Shopping for an house right here isn’t simply shopping for an house. The equal within the U.S. could be like shopping for a great single-family dwelling with a storage within the U.S., besides that it comes with a bunch of NVIDIA shares,” stated Chae Sang-wook, an unbiased actual property analyst. “In South Korea, folks spend money on apateu for capital good points, not money circulate 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 performed lately, South Koreans could now not want such dense housing. The continued rise of single-person households, too, could 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 prefer to assemble their very own furnishings, not to mention repair their very own automobiles — all downstream results of ubiquitous house dwelling.
“For now, there isn’t any various aside from this,” he stated. “As a South Korean, you don’t have the posh of selecting.”
