SEOUL — For a lot of Individuals, the residence the place 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-hee lives could 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 advanced consists of 36 separate constructions, that are almost similar aside from the constructing quantity displayed on their sides.
The two,000-plus models are available in the identical standardized dimensions discovered in all places within the nation (Lee lives in a “84C,” which has 84 sq. meters, or about 900 sq. toes, of ground 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 gymnasium, an administration workplace, a senior heart and a “mothers cafe.”
However this, for essentially the most half, is South Korea’s middle-class dream of residence possession — its model of a home with the white picket fence.
“The larger the residence advanced, the higher the encircling infrastructure, like public transportation, faculties, hospitals, grocery tales, parks and so forth,” Lee mentioned. “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 Photos Group by way of Getty Photos)
Most within the nation would agree: In the present day, 64% of South Korean households dwell 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 commonly 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 Occasions final yr. “Condominium buildings are anathema to town’s ethos.”
In recent times, the worth 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 houses, 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 nearly 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 applied led to the primacy of the residence, and in doing so, reworked South Korean notions of housing over the course of a single technology.
The outcomes of that program have been combined. However in a single necessary respect, a minimum of, it has been profitable: Seoul, which is half the scale of town of L.A., is residence to a inhabitants of 9.6 million — in contrast with the estimated 3.3 million individuals who dwell right here.
For Lee, the trade-off is a worthwhile one.
In a really perfect world, she would have a storage for the form of storage gross sales she’s admired in American motion pictures. “However South Korea is a small nation,” she mentioned. “It’s vital to make use of area as effectively as doable.”
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 automobile to get in all places.
“Perhaps it’s due to my Korean have to have the whole lot executed shortly, however I believe it’d be uncomfortable to dwell someplace that doesn’t have these items inside attain always,” she mentioned. “I prefer to exit at evening; I believe it will be boring to have all of the lights go off at 9 p.m.”
A normal view exhibits steam rising from workplace and residence buildings that outline the Seoul skyline. (Ed Jones / AFP by way of Getty Photos)
Condominium buildings gentle up within the night as individuals return residence 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 fast industrialization and subsequent city inhabitants increase.
Within the Nineteen Sixties, single-family indifferent dwellings made up round 95% of houses 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 houses. Because of this, a lot of them settled in shantytowns on town’s outskirts, residing in makeshift sheet-metal houses.
The authoritarian authorities on the time, led by a former military normal named Park Chung-hee, declared flats to be the answer and launched into a constructing spree that might proceed underneath subsequent administrations. Eased peak restrictions and incentives for development firms helped add between 20,000 to 100,000 new residence 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. Generally known as apateu, which particularly refers to a high-rise residence 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, nearly each big-name celeb on the time appeared in residence 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 had been executed at scale, in complexes of 5 buildings or extra.”
Important to the fashionable apateu are the facilities — similar to on-site kindergartens or comfort shops — that enable them to perform 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 “citadel” or “palace.” (One of many first such branded residence complexes was Trump Tower, a luxurious improvement in-built Seoul within the late Nineteen Nineties by a development agency that licensed the title of Donald Trump.)
All of this has made the indifferent single-family residence, for essentially the most half, out of date. In Seoul, such houses 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 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 heart whereas discouraging individuals from angrily confronting their neighbors, a state of affairs that often escalates into headline-making violence.
Some residence 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 residence model in one of many wealthiest areas of Seoul appears 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 Photos)
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 hooked up to them, there may be additionally a wariness a couple of tradition the place houses are in-built such disposable, meeting line-like style.
Many individuals listed here are more and more questioning how this type of housing, with its almost similar 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 related,” mentioned Maing Pil-soo, an architect and concrete planning professor at Seoul Nationwide College. “And with related life, you find yourself with an identical mind-set. Very similar to the cityscape itself, the whole lot turns into flattened and uniform.”
Jung, the anthropologist, believes South Korea’s residence 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 here are undoubtedly extraordinarily handy — that’s why they turned so common,” he mentioned. “However a part of that comfort is as a result of they insulate you from the considerations 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 a long time previous. Additionally it is, in some methods, an equalizing pressure.
“I believe flats are partly why sure varieties of social inequalities you see within the U.S. are comparatively much less extreme in South Korea,” he mentioned.
Although many branded residence 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 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 onerous to see in lots of American cities, porous and accessible. Wealthier usually means having a nicer residence, however an residence all the identical, present in the identical environs as these in a special value vary.
“And regardless that we often use disparaging phrases like ‘hen coop’ to explain them, when you truly step inside a kind of flats, they don’t really feel like that in any respect,” Jung mentioned. “They are surely fairly comfy and good.”
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Individuals pose for images amongst a discipline of cosmos flowers in entrance of high-rise residence buildings in Goyang, west of Seoul. (Ed Jones / AFP by way of Getty Photos)
None of this, nonetheless, has been capable of stave off Seoul’s personal present-day housing affordability disaster.
The capital has probably the most costly residence 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 keeping with a report revealed final month by Deutsche Financial institution. One particularly brutal stretch not too long ago noticed residence 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 residence 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 residence costs.
“Shopping for an residence right here isn’t simply shopping for an residence. The equal within the U.S. can be like shopping for a really perfect single-family residence with a storage within the U.S., besides that it comes with a bunch of NVIDIA shares,” mentioned Chae Sang-wook, an unbiased actual property analyst. “In South Korea, individuals spend money on apateu for capital good points, not money circulate from hire.”
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 executed in recent times, 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 can 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 residence residing.
“For now, there is no such thing as a various aside from this,” he mentioned. “As a South Korean, you don’t have the posh of selecting.”
