SEOUL — For a lot of People, the condominium the place 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-hee lives may be the stuff of nightmares.
Positioned simply outdoors the capital of Seoul, the constructing isn’t very tall — simply 16 tales — by South Korean requirements, however the complicated consists of 36 separate buildings, that are practically equivalent aside from the constructing quantity displayed on their sides.
The two,000-plus models are available 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 flooring area) and supply, in some methods, a ready-made life. The facilities scattered all through the campus embrace a rock backyard with a faux waterfall, a playground, a fitness center, an administration workplace, a senior heart and a “moms cafe.”
However this, for essentially the most half, is South Korea’s middle-class dream of house possession — its model of a home with the white picket fence.
“The bigger the apartment complex, the better the surrounding infrastructure, like public transportation, schools, hospitals, grocery stories, parks and so on,” Lee mentioned. “I like how easy it is to communicate with the neighbors in the complex because there’s a well-run online community.”
House blocks are the predominant housing format in Seoul.
(Common Pictures Group through Getty Pictures)
Most within the nation would agree: At this time, 64% of South Korean households reside in such multifamily housing, nearly all of them in residences 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 often seen as an endless tableau of individual houses, each with their own yard and garden,” Max Podemski, an L.A.-based city planner, wrote in The Instances final yr. “Apartment buildings are anathema to the city’s ethos.”
Lately, the worth 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 practically 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 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 an identical crossroads. However the sequence of city housing insurance policies it applied led to the primacy of the condominium, 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 essential respect, a minimum of, it has been profitable: Seoul, which is half the scale of town of L.A., is house to a inhabitants of 9.6 million — in contrast with the estimated 3.3 million individuals who reside right here.
For Lee, the trade-off is a worthwhile one.
In a really perfect world, she would have a storage for the type of storage gross sales she’s admired in American films. “But South Korea is a small country,” she mentioned. “It is necessary to use space as efficiently as possible.”
Residences, in her view, have spared her from the miseries of suburban housing. Eating places and shops are shut by. Easy accessibility to public transportation means she doesn’t want a automotive to get all over the place.
“Maybe it’s because of my Korean need to have everything done quickly, but I think it’d be uncomfortable to live somewhere that doesn’t have these things within reach at all times,” she mentioned. “I like to go out at night; I think it would be boring to have all the lights go off at 9 p.m.”
A common view reveals steam rising from workplace and condominium buildings that outline the Seoul skyline. (Ed Jones / AFP through Getty Pictures)
House buildings gentle 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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Residences first started showing in South Korea within the 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 speedy industrialization and subsequent city inhabitants increase.
Within the Sixties, single-family indifferent dwellings made up round 95% of properties within the nation. However over the next decade, as rural migrants flooded Seoul in quest of 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. In consequence, lots 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 common named Park Chung-hee, declared residences to be the answer and launched into a constructing spree that may proceed beneath subsequent administrations. Eased peak restrictions and incentives for development corporations helped add between 20,000 to 100,000 new condominium models yearly.
They had 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 courses. Referred to as apateu, which particularly refers to a high-rise condominium constructing constructed as half of a bigger complicated — as distinct from decrease stand-alone buildings — they symbolized Western cachet and upward social mobility.
“Around the late 1990s and early 2000s, almost every big-name celebrity at the time appeared in apartment commercials,” recalled Jung Heon-mok, an anthropologist on the Academy of Korean Research who has studied the historical past of South Korean residences. “But the biggest reason that apartments proliferated as they did was because they were done at scale, in complexes of five buildings or more.”
Important to the fashionable apateu are the facilities — equivalent to on-site kindergartens or comfort shops — that permit 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 “castle” or “palace.” (One of many first such branded condominium 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 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 in the garden for 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 heart whereas discouraging individuals from angrily confronting their neighbors, a state of affairs that often escalates into headline-making violence.
Some condominium 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 complicated constructed by a big-name condominium model in one of many wealthiest areas of Seoul appears so oppressive that it has grow to be a curiosity, mocked by some as a jail or rooster coop.
House complexes in Seoul on Oct. 5, 2024. Residences first started showing in South Korea in 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 Pictures)
The sheer variety of residences 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 hooked up 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 here are more and more questioning how this type of housing, with its practically equivalent layouts, has formed the disposition of latest South Korean society, typically criticized by its personal members as overly homogenized and lockstep.
“I’m concerned that apartments have made South Koreans’ lifestyles too similar,” mentioned Maing Pil-soo, an architect and concrete planning professor at Seoul Nationwide College. “And with similar lifestyles, you end up with a similar way of thinking. Much like the cityscape itself, everything becomes flattened and uniform.”
Jung, the anthropologist, believes South Korea’s condominium complexes, with their promise of an atomized, frictionless life, have eroded the extra expansive social bonds that outlined conventional society — like people who prolonged throughout complete villages — making its inhabitants extra individualistic and insular.
“At the end of the day, apartments here are undoubtedly extremely convenient — that’s why they became so popular,” he mentioned. “But part of that convenience is because they insulate you from the concerns of the wider world. Once you’re inside your complex and in your home, you don’t have to pay attention to your neighbors or their issues.”
Nonetheless, Jung says this uniformity isn’t all unhealthy. It’s what made them such simply scalable options to the housing disaster of a long time previous. It is usually, in some methods, an equalizing pressure.
“I think apartments are partly why certain types of social inequalities you see in the U.S. are comparatively less severe in South Korea,” he mentioned.
Although many branded condominium complexes now resemble gated communities with exclusionary house owner associations, Jung factors out that on the entire, the dominance of multifamily housing has inadvertently inspired extra social mixing between courses, 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 arduous to see in lots of American cities, porous and accessible. Wealthier typically means having a nicer condominium, however an condominium all the identical, current in the identical environs as these in a distinct worth vary.
“And even though we occasionally use disparaging terms like ‘chicken coop’ to describe them, once you actually step inside one of those apartments, they don’t feel like that at all,” Jung mentioned. “They really are quite comfortable and nice.”
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Folks pose for images amongst a discipline of cosmos flowers in entrance of high-rise condominium buildings in Goyang, west of Seoul. (Ed Jones / AFP through Getty Pictures)
None of this, nevertheless, has been in a position to stave off Seoul’s personal present-day housing affordability disaster.
The capital has probably the most costly condominium 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 just lately noticed condominium costs in Seoul double in 4 years.
A part of the explanation for that is that residences, with their standardized dimensions, have successfully grow to be interchangeable monetary commodities: An condominium 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 house costs.
“Buying an apartment here isn’t just buying an apartment. The equivalent in the U.S. would be like buying an ideal single-family home with a garage in the U.S., except that it comes with a bunch of NVIDIA shares,” mentioned Chae Sang-wook, an impartial actual property analyst. “In South Korea, people invest in apateu for capital gains, not cash flow from rent.”
Some consultants predict that, because the nation enters one other period of demographic upheaval, the dominance of residences will sometime be no extra.
If births proceed to fall as dramatically as they’ve carried out in recent times, 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 can 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 condominium dwelling.
“For now, there is no alternative other than this,” he mentioned. “As a South Korean, you don’t have the luxury of choosing.”
