People Power Party lawmaker Yoo Ui-dong said Tuesday that South Korea cannot solve its real estate problems without abandoning the notion that non-resident single homeowners are speculators and that owner-occupancy is the only fix.
Yoo, who chairs the National Assembly's Land and Transportation Committee, made the remarks during an appearance on SBS Radio. "If every home in Seoul were required to be owner-occupied, more than half of Seoul's current residents are tenants — they would be pushed out to surrounding areas like Gyeonggi Province and Incheon," he said.
He also questioned the workability of carving out exemptions for so-called reasonable non-residents. "Who gets to define what 'reasonable' means?" he said. "Once you start making exceptions — say, allowing families with middle-school children but not those with elementary-school children — you open the door to endless disputes and the system inevitably ends up a patchwork."
Yoo was equally critical of actual-residency regulations, including the land transaction permit system. "Regulators expanded the rules across all of Seoul, but have housing prices stabilized?" he said. "If tenants are pushed out of Seoul into Gyeonggi Province and Incheon, jeonse and monthly rent prices in those surrounding areas could rise in a chain reaction."
On the government's reported review of partially rolling back its Aug. 3 tax reform package, Yoo shot back: "Then what was the point of the Aug. 3 measures in the first place?" He said the government had originally framed the package as a tax overhaul aimed at fair and normalized taxation, and that now describing it as merely a starting point for gathering public opinion undermines policy credibility.
Yoo also raised concerns about a proposal to transfer authority over redevelopment and reconstruction projects of 500 units or fewer to local district heads. "You have to explain why 500 units is the right threshold," he said, warning that different standards across districts could lead to haphazard development.
He also opposed using part of the Yongsan Park site for housing supply. "This was not parkland that was damaged — it was a military base that was designated to become a park," Yoo said. He stressed that the law governing the site obligates the government to develop the entire main site as Yongsan Park and prohibits rezoning or selling any portion of it for non-park purposes. "Moving to undermine that would hollow out the law itself," he said.
mp1256@heraldcorp.com
