Seoul – For many Americans, the apartment where 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-Hee lives could be a nightmare.
The building just outside the Seoul capital is not just 16 stories by Korean standards, but the complex consists of 36 separate structures, roughly the same except for the number of buildings shown on the side.
Over 2,000 units are of the same standardized dimensions as found anywhere in the country (Lee lives in the “84c” with a floor area of 84 square meters, or about 900 square feet, offering ready-made living in several ways. Amenities scattered throughout the campus include fake waterfalls, playgrounds, gyms, management offices, senior centers and rock gardens with “mama cafes.”
However, this is mostly a dream of owning a middle class Korean home. This is the version of the house with a white picket fence.
“The bigger the apartment, the better the surrounding infrastructure, including public transport, schools, hospitals, grocery stories, and parks,” Lee said. “I love how easy it is to communicate with neighbors in the complex, as there is a well-run online community.”
Apartment blocks are Seoul’s main residential format.
(Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Most of the country agree. Today, 64% of Korean households live in such multi-family homes, with the majority living in apartments with five or more stories.
This reality seems unimaginable in a city like Los Angeles. Los Angeles has restricted or banned the construction of dense homes in detached house zones.
“Los Angeles is often considered an endless tableau of individual homes, each with its own garden and garden,” writes Max Podemski, a LA-based city planner, in the Times last year. “The apartment building is a dislike for the city’s spirit.”
In recent years, the prices of that spirit have become increasingly apparent in the form of a serious housing shortage. In Los Angeles, almost 75% of all residential areas are zoned in separate, single-family homes, causing rent to fall into seemingly endless rises, contributing to one of the nation’s worst homeless crisis. As a relief measure, California ordered the construction of more than 450,000 new housing units by 2029.
The plan almost certainly requires the construction of some form of apartment-style housing, but construction is delayed amid intense resistance.
Sixty years ago, South Korea was at a similar crossroads. However, the set of urban housing policies it implemented led to the advantage of apartments, and in doing so changed the Korean concept of housing during a single generation.
The results of that program are mixed. But in one important respect, it’s at least successful. Seoul is half the size of a city in LA and has a population of 9.6 million compared to the estimated 3.3 million people living here.
For Lee, trade-offs are worth it.
In an ideal world, she has a garage sales garage that she admires in American films. “But Korea is a small country,” she said. “You need to use the space as efficiently as possible.”
In her view, the apartment did not spare her from the misery of suburban housing. Restaurants and shops are nearby. Easy access to public transport means you don’t need a car to get anywhere.
“Maybe it’s because my Koreans need to do everything quickly, but I think it’s uncomfortable for these things to live out of reach all the time,” she said. “I like going out at night. I think it’s boring to turn off all the lights at 9pm.”
A general view shows steam rising from the office and apartment buildings that define the Seoul skyline. (Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images)
When I get home from work in Seoul on March 25th, 2021, my apartment building lights up in the evening (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
***
Apartments first began to appear in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a byproduct of the rapid industrialization of the era and the subsequent urban population boom as part of the government’s response to the housing crisis in the country’s capital.
In the 1960s, detached houses accounted for about 95% of the domestic homes. But over the next decade, many of this new urban working class found themselves without a home as rural migrants flooded Seoul for factory work, doubling the population from 2.4 million to 5.5 million. As a result, many of them settled in Shanty Town, on the outskirts of the city, living in makeshift sheet metal homes.
The authoritarian government at the time, led by a former army general named Park Cheong Hee, declared the apartments as a solution and set out on a building that would continue under subsequent administrations. The construction company height restrictions and incentive relaxation helped add 20,000-100,000 new apartment units each year.
They were pushed out as a paradise for high-tech modern danists by Korean political leaders and soon became the most desirable homes for the middle and upper classes. Known as Apateu, it specifically refers to a high-rise apartment building built as part of a larger complex.
“From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, almost every famous person from that time appeared in apartment commercials,” recalls Jung Heon-Mok, an anthropologist at the Academy of Korean Studies, who studied the history of Korean apartments. “But the biggest reason the apartments have grown as much as they do is because they were done on a large scale, and they were done in a complex of more than five buildings.”
Essential to modern Apatheu are amenities in on-site kindergartens and convenience stores that allow them to function like miniature towns. This has also transformed it into symbolizing the goods and classes of brands built by construction conglomerates like Samsung, giving them names such as “castles” and “palaces.” (One of the first such branded apartments was Trump Tower, a luxurious development built in Seoul in the late 1990s by a construction company that authorized Donald Trump’s name.)
All of this has made detached houses, mostly outdated. In Seoul, such homes currently account for only 10% of the housing stock. Among many young Koreans like Lee, they are associated with retirement in the countryside.
***
This model is not without problems.
There are normal problems associated with dense housing. In poorly soundproofed buildings, “floor-to-floor noise” between units is a very universal tragedy, so the government dissuades people from angering and facing their neighbors while operating noise-related conflict resolution centres.
Some apartments have proven to be too many for countries that are used to sentimentally efficient forms of housing. One of the 19-storey 4,635-unit complexes built by a well-known apartment brand in one of Seoul’s wealthiest regions is so oppressive that it became an ock-laughed curiosity as a prison or chicken coop.
Apartment complex in Seoul on October 5th, 2024. Apartments first began to appear in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the government’s response to the housing crisis in the country’s capital.
(Tina HSU/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The vast number of apartments have spurred criticism of the Seoul skyline as barren and ugly. Koreans describe their uniform rectangular pillars as “matchboxes.” And there is also vigilance about the culture in which homes are built in such a disposable assembly line, despite the aspirations that accompany them.
Many people here are increasingly wondering how housing in this form, with a nearly identical layout, shapes the disposal of modern Korean society.
“We are pleased to announce that Maine Pil Sue, an architect and professor of urban planning at Seoul National University,” said: “And with a similar lifestyle, you think like that. Everything is flat and even, just like the streetscape itself.”
Anthropologist Jung believes that Korean apartments have eroded vast social ties that define a more individualistic, isolated traditional society, as they spread throughout the village, with the promise of a life without atomized, friction.
“At the end of the day, the apartments here are definitely very convenient, which is why they became so popular,” he said. “But part of its convenience is because they are sequestering you from concerns of the wider world. Once you’re inside your home in your complex, you don’t have to pay attention to your neighbors or their problems.”
Still, Jung says that all this uniformity isn’t bad. That’s why they have created a very easy and scalable solution to the housing crisis of decades ago. And, in a sense, it’s equal power.
“I think apartments are part of the reason why certain types of social inequality seen in the US are relatively less severe in Korea,” he said.
While many branded apartment facilities now resemble gated communities with exclusive homeowners associations, Jung points out that overall, the domination of apartment complexes misinforms more social mixing between classes.
Even Seoul’s wealthiest regions find themselves porous and accessible to a level that is hard to see in many American cities. Being wealthy often means having a better apartment, but likewise apartments exist in different price ranges and in the same environment.
“And we sometimes use disp-like terms like “heart coop” to describe them, but when you actually step into one of those apartments, they don’t feel that way at all,” Jung said. “They are really very comfortable and lovely.”
***
People take photos between fields of cosmos flowers in front of a high-rise apartment in Goyang, west of Seoul. (Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images)
But none of this could stem the current affordability crisis of Seoul’s own homes.
According to a report released last month by Deutsche Bank, the capital ranks fourth in the world at a price per square meter, behind Hong Kong, Zurich, Singapore and major U.S. cities such as New York and San Francisco. One particularly brutal stretch recently doubled the price of an apartment in Seoul in four years.
Part of the reason for this is that apartments with standardized dimensions become effective exchangeable financial products. Seoul apartments are considered a much more reliable bet than any stock, leading to intense real estate investments and speculation that has raised home prices.
“It’s not just about buying an apartment here, you’re buying an apartment. In the US it’s like buying an ideal detached house with a US garage, except that it comes with a lot of Nvidia stocks.” “In Korea, people invest in Apatheu for capital gains, not cash flow from rent.”
Some experts predict that once the country enters another era of drastic demographic changes, apartment control will eventually disappear.
If births continue to fall dramatically as dramatically as they have in recent years, Koreans may no longer need such dense housing. The continued rise of a single household could also cut down on the shape of the homes built to house four nuclear families.
However, Choi is skeptical that this will happen soon. He doesn’t even like Koreans to assemble their own furniture, and not to mention repairing their own cars, it’s all downstream effects of ubiquitous apartment life.
“At this point, there’s no other option,” he said. “As a Korean, I don’t have the luxury to choose.”
Source link
