At the foot of Guryongsan Mountain in Gaepo-dong, Gangnam-gu, a shanty town sits just across the road from ultra-expensive residential complexes such as Tower Palace and Kyunggi Girls' High School. This is Guryong Village. It is an unfathomable sight for prime real estate in Seoul's affluent Gangnam district. Shacks pieced together with layers of vinyl and scrap recycled cotton for winter insulation stand crammed together. Electric wires tangle overhead, while gas pipes run haphazardly across the ground. The moment one lays eyes on it, the worry immediately arises: "What if a fire breaks out?" That fear is not unfounded.
At around 3:50 p.m. on October 27, a massive fire broke out. Amid dry conditions and strong winds, the flames swept through nearly the entire village. An area of approximately 190,000 square meters—equivalent to 26 soccer fields—was scorched. While no deaths were reported, one resident was injured, and 127 residents from 77 households were displaced.
Because every structure is illegal and unauthorized, fire safety regulations are virtually nonexistent. Consequently, while combustible materials such as plywood, styrofoam, and vinyl sheets are everywhere, there are no firefighting facilities, fire truck access routes, or fire-resistant compartments. The area is practically defenseless against fires. As a result, more than 20 fires, large and small, have struck Guryong Village since 2009. In particular, major fires that triggered a Level 1 fire response or higher—mobilizing all firefighting resources within the jurisdiction—have occurred seven times over the past decade. They have become almost an annual occurrence.
This year alone, a major blaze broke out in January that prompted a Level 2 fire response. Around 250 residents evacuated urgently, leaving some 180 people displaced. In January 2023, another major fire triggering a Level 2 response destroyed about 60 housing units, forced roughly 500 residents to evacuate, and displaced some 60 individuals. In addition, large fires that put all of Seoul on high alert have occurred incessantly, including in March 2022 and November 2014.
Guryong Village is neither a naturally formed rural village nor a typical slum. It is the shadow cast by the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, as well as a scar left behind by state-led urban beautification and development. In the mid-to-late 1980s, ahead of these international events, the government carried out mass forced demolitions of urban squatter settlements across Jamsil, Gaepo, and Dongjak. Displaced residents with nowhere else to go retreated into the northern foothills of Guryongsan Mountain, where crackdowns were lax because the land was privately owned forest within a greenbelt (development restriction zone). Following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, an additional influx of low-income families unable to shoulder rising housing costs joined them. It expanded into Seoul's largest unauthorized shanty town, housing over 1,200 households.
Since then, Guryong Village has been caught in a dilemma between "dismantling an illegal settlement" and "humanitarian protection of residents," drifting through repeated stopgap administration and policy stalemates. Until the early 2000s, it remained semi-abandoned amid local government crackdowns on unauthorized structures and fierce pushback from residents. In 2011, following a Supreme Court ruling ordering that minimum rights to survival be guaranteed, de facto administrative management began with the assignment of temporary lot numbers, the provision of electricity and water, and the authorization of resident registration. In 2011, then-Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon officially announced a full public redevelopment project led by the Seoul Housing and Communities Corporation (SH).
However, after Park Won-soon took office as Seoul Mayor, the project ground to a complete halt as the Seoul Metropolitan Government pushed for a mixed replotting method to accelerate development, while the Gangnam District Office insisted on a 100% expropriation method, arguing it could not risk preferential treatment controversies. The impasse culminated in 2014 in an unprecedented situation where the urban development zone designation automatically lapsed after passing the statutory deadline. Immediately afterward, when a fatal major fire sparked an outpouring of public outrage, the Seoul Metropolitan Government reversed its stance. Accepting the Gangnam District Office's position, Guryong Village was re-designated as an urban development zone in late 2016.
Yet even today, a decade later, the redevelopment of Guryong Village remains stalled. This is because the three main stakeholders—landowners, residents, and local authorities—each have completely different calculations. At first glance, this seems incomprehensible. For landowners, breaking the current stalemate where they cannot exercise their land rights would seem unconditionally advantageous under any compensation scheme. For residents, accepting government relocation measures and moving into decent public rental housing would seem far preferable to suffering squalid conditions and the constant threat of infernos. For local authorities, redevelopment offers both the moral justification of clearing illegal shacks to eliminate disaster risks and the tangible benefit of expanding tax revenues by developing luxury residential parcels. There would appear to be ample room to convince all three parties to move redevelopment forward. Why, then, has the project dragged on for so long?
① "Holding Out Is More Profitable Than Being Expropriated for Dirt Cheap"
More than 80% of Guryong Village's total site of approximately 266,000 square meters is privately owned land. Development is impossible without reaching an agreement with these landowners. However, the landowners flatly reject the current public development plan based on 100% expropriation. Under this formula, land compensation is assessed based on its status as "natural green space in a restricted development zone." While apartment land in the adjacent Gaepo-dong area commands market prices of tens of millions to 100 million won per pyeong (approximately 3.3 square meters), the appraised value based on official land prices stands at merely several million won per pyeong. From the landowners' perspective, "it amounts to handing over hundreds of billions of won in development gains entirely to the public sector." Having endured more than 30 years without being able to exercise their property rights, they insist they cannot surrender now. They cling to the expectation that if they bide their time, a change in administration or mayor could alter policy toward replotting—returning part of the developed land—or private development reflecting actual market rates. Moreover, speculative real estate syndicates that split land shares have also jumped into the fray. Having bought land to extract maximum development profits, their stance is even more uncompromising. This has made it difficult even for landowners among themselves to reach a unified consensus or exit strategy. They have waged an array of legal battles against the Seoul Metropolitan Government, including lawsuits to invalidate the zone designation and cancel compensation plans. While most ended in favor of Seoul City, the project timeline has been stretched indefinitely amid these protracted legal fights.
② "Rental Housing Is a Dead End; We Will Not Leave Without Apartment Purchase Rights"
The gulf in compensation standards between the administrative authorities and the residents living in unauthorized homes is also vast. Current provisions under the Urban Development Act and the Act on the Acquisition of and Compensation for Land are clear. In principle, occupants of unauthorized structures are entitled only to "occupancy rights for public rental housing and prescribed moving and relocation allowances." Rights to purchase regular commercial apartments are not granted. Yet for the current residents living in absolute poverty, even rental costs are unaffordable. Currently, squatting illegally on private land means they pay no land use fees or monthly rent. However, moving into public rental housing creates fixed monthly outlays: interest on rental deposit loans, monthly rent, and apartment management fees. For them, these costs spell financial ruin.
Underlying this resistance are deep-seated victim mentalities and entitlement stemming from having endured grueling living conditions for 30 to 40 years. Having witnessed neighboring shanty towns in Gaepo-dong transform into multi-billion-won luxury apartment complexes, they are making a last-ditch stand, declaring they will not leave unless they are given "regular apartment purchase rights or rights to convert to ownership at low cost." Furthermore, cases of fraudulent residency registrations by outside speculators are not uncommon, making the task of weeding them out an uphill battle.
③ Governments and Municipalities Caught in a Trap
The central government and local authorities are trapped in a no-win dilemma between the "demolition trauma" accumulated through modern Korean history and "preferential treatment controversies." Legally, authorities possess the power to demolish illegal structures and expropriate land via administrative execution. However, if elderly and impoverished residents erect watchtowers and wage a life-or-death struggle with gas cylinders, casualties cannot be ruled out. For public officials and public corporations, bureaucratic self-protection takes over: "If a tragedy occurs during compulsory execution, we will have to shoulder all the blame." At the same time, conceding to the demands of landowners and residents to proceed with the project is not an option either. Doing so would set the worst possible precedent—that "holding out and throwing tantrums yields extra-legal benefits." It would almost certainly invite fierce public backlash over fairness, allegations of favoritism, and breach-of-trust controversies. Consequently, the project has drifted for years amid political friction dictated by shifts in presidential and mayoral administrations.
In the end, Guryong Village has become trapped in a maze of tangled interests—interlocking its unique status as Gangnam's prime golden real estate, a profit-distribution dispute locked in a zero-sum game, and the social trauma etched by South Korea's brutal history of forced evictions. The astronomical projected development profits, the relative ease of redevelopment on what is effectively open land, and the universally acknowledged justification for development have paradoxically turned into a noose immobilizing everyone. Amid such irony, this ticking time bomb of massive fires has hardened into an impregnable fortress that no one dares dismantle.
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