Oh Se-hoon hits back at Lee Jae Myung, says housing prices began rising when president took office

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon on Friday rebuffed President Lee Jae Myung after Lee cited the previous administration and Oh as factors behind the sharp rise in Seoul real estate prices. Oh said it is "a fact" that housing prices began climbing again around the time Lee took office — after having stabilized following the reinstatement of the land transaction permit zone system.

Oh posted on social media that day, saying data clearly shows Seoul housing prices trended downward during his tenure as the city's eighth directly elected mayor before reversing course around the time Lee assumed the presidency. At a press conference Friday, Lee had attributed the surge in housing prices in part to short-term causes, saying that from 2022 — the year the Yoon Suk Yeol administration took power and the year Oh was elected mayor — the number of building permits and ground-breakings was cut in half. Lee added that supply shrank dramatically between 2022 and 2025 as a result, and that the lifting of land transaction permit restrictions caused prices to spike in certain areas.

Oh said in response that the president "cannot be unaware of the process and time required for housing to reach the ground-breaking stage," and that it remains an unchangeable fact — however much Lee may wish to deny it — that former Mayor Park Won-soon scrapped redevelopment and reconstruction projects across all of Seoul, wiping out that entire pipeline. Oh added that had Lee properly reviewed the redevelopment and reconstruction progress report submitted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, "it would have been difficult to make the remarks he made today." He said he could not help but ask whether Lee had simply not looked at the report or had chosen to read only what he wanted to believe.

Oh said blaming him might put the president's mind at ease, but asked why, if Seoul's rising housing prices were his fault, he had been re-elected mayor and why the president's approval rating in Seoul kept falling. He then said the president was welcome to blame him as much as he liked, but urged Lee to at least properly grasp "the reality unfolding on the ground right now." Oh added that Seoul housing prices had been rising more steeply and for longer than under any previous administration, leaving no time to argue over who was responsible.

Oh said he had previously told the president not to run on "wishful thinking" based on a handful of softening prices in Gangnam, and suggested Lee appeared to be pinning his hopes on selective data and treating the catch-up price increases in Seoul's outer districts as a merely temporary phenomenon.

He said Seoul citizens on Friday did not hear the answer they had been waiting for from the president — that instead of a pledge to fundamentally reverse a flawed real estate policy, all they got was blame shifted onto Oh Se-hoon. Oh said he had previously suspected that aides were feeding the president incorrect information, but that after watching Friday's press conference he had changed his mind. The problem, he said, lay with the president himself being trapped in a false conviction and refusing to accept reality.

Oh wrote that the president was free to blame him a hundred times over, but asked that at least once among those hundred he take a hard look at the reality facing young people unable to find homes and newlyweds giving up on homeownership at the loan counter. "Stop the excess of self-conviction," he wrote. "The president's mind needs a full reset before citizens' lives collapse any further."