Oh Se-hoon: "Policies Without Reflection Repeat Failure ... Lee Must Correct Course on Housing Policy"

Seoul Metropolitan Government Introduces Housing Policy White Paper
Criticizes Former Mayor Park Wonsoon's Redevelopment Policies
Calls Lee Jaemyung's Real Estate Policy "Evading Responsibility"

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon cited a recent white paper on housing policy published by the Seoul Metropolitan Government on the 18th, calling on the government and ruling party to "finally acknowledge their failure and correct the direction of their policies."

In a post on Facebook that day titled "An Apologia from the Seoul Metropolitan Government: I Recommend You Read It," Oh said, "It has been exactly one year since the Lee Jae-myung administration announced its October 15 real estate measures, and the results are so dismal that it is painful even to look at them."

"The government appears to have neither the courage to reflect on the past nor the will to face reality," he said. "Instead, the president and the Democratic Party are busy evading responsibility by blaming the current housing supply cliff on the incumbent mayor."

He then introduced the white paper, "A 20-Year Review and Reflection on Seoul's Housing Supply Policies," released by the Seoul Metropolitan Government on the 16th, describing it as "a candid and remorseful confession in which Seoul officials looked back on the past themselves and laid bare the wounds left by misguided policies."

Drawing on the white paper, Mayor Oh criticized redevelopment policies during the tenure of former Mayor Park Won-soon. "During Mayor Park Won-soon's tenure, 389 redevelopment zones were canceled, eliminating the opportunity to supply 430,000 homes," he said. "At the time, the construction industry was recovering from the fallout of the financial crisis, and we stood on the brink of a golden age for housing supply."

Seoul Mayor Oh Sehoon answers questions from committee members during a parliamentary audit by the Public Administration and Security Committee at Seoul City Hall on the 15th. Yonhap News Agency.

"Not only were areas where project promotion committees had already been formed and approvals for establishing associations had been granted canceled, but even areas that had received project implementation approval were scrapped," he said. "As many as 159 areas, or 41% of the total, were canceled despite having made considerable progress."

He also raised concerns about the process of canceling redevelopment zones. Mayor Oh criticized "cases in which cancellations were rushed under the guise of surveying residents' opinions, even using the names of deceased people; cases in which zones were canceled based on arbitrary interpretations of ordinances; and cases in which they were canceled by administrative authority despite opposition from residents and district governments."

"Underlying this was a hostile view that 'redevelopment and reconstruction are speculation,'" he said. "The misguided decisions made 15 years ago have come back to us as the 'deletion of homes' that should have been supplied by now."

Mayor Oh said the white paper was also distributed last week to the offices of members of the National Assembly's Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee, and urged lawmakers from both the ruling and opposition parties to read it. In particular, addressing Democratic Party lawmakers, he stressed, "Just as the Seoul Metropolitan Government has openly admitted its past mistakes and reflected on them, the government and ruling party must finally acknowledge their failure and correct the direction of their policies."

"Policies without reflection repeat their failures, and the public always pays the price," he added. "Instead of devoting your time to attacking me, I urge you to first look at the lives of people weighed down by housing prices."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.