▲ People Power Party Representative Jang Dong-hyuk speaks during a youth housing site meeting after visiting the E-Land PEER Sinchon Youth Safe Housing in Mapo-gu, Seoul, along with the party's Special Committee on Normalization of Real Estate Policy Youth Housing Task Force on the 3rd.
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has strongly criticized President Lee Jae-myung's remarks regarding preparations for a housing price crash, asking, "Are you living in a world of your own, Mr. President?"
In a post uploaded to Facebook today (the 3rd), Mayor Oh stated, "Seoul apartment prices have risen for 90 consecutive weeks and this year's growth rate is the highest on record, so where on earth did you see signs of a housing price crash?"
Earlier in the day, President Lee said during a Cabinet meeting that actual transaction prices in major areas are dropping to a surprising extent.
The President subsequently stated via social media, "We are already devising contingency measures, including large-scale government purchases for public rental housing use, in the event of a sharp drop in housing prices."
In response, Mayor Oh remarked, "Do you view housing prices as having been stabilized simply because loans were choked off and people were rendered unable to buy homes?" He added, "Are only the numbers you wish to see catching your eye, while the lease and jeonse (lump-sum housing deposit) prices soaring day after day remain invisible?"
Mayor Oh continued, "Citizens are anxious day by day wondering when a jeonse and monthly rent bomb will drop, and I simply cannot understand what the President is looking at to worry about a housing price crash first."
He criticized, "While everyone is struggling to put out the fire right at their feet, it is like the President alone setting out to prepare for a flood."
Mayor Oh also refuted the President's mention of housing approval figures made earlier that day.
"It seems responsibility for the decline in approvals since 2022 is once again being shifted to the Seoul Metropolitan Government," Mayor Oh argued, adding, "During the tenure of former Mayor Park Won-soon, as many as 389 redevelopment zones were canceled and the opportunity to supply 430,000 housing units vanished."
He went on to say, "We have been running day and night to redesignate zones, improve project feasibility, and lead approvals to construction in order to revive that collapsed supply foundation. Now that results are just beginning to show, the current administration claims that approvals have normalized. This is beyond brazen; it is a shameless distortion of facts."
Claiming that the government's "obsession with actual residency" has fueled a "triple-strong" trend in which housing purchase prices, jeonse deposits, and monthly rent are rising together, Mayor Oh stated, "If you have no intention of facing reality properly, you would be better off just staying still."
He urged, "If you wish not to remain as the worst real estate policy failure administration, it would be advisable to reform your advisors related to housing policy even now."
(Photo: Joint Press Corps, Yonhap News)
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