Oh Se-hoon: "Government and Ruling Party Must Acknowledge Real Estate Policy Failures and Correct Course"

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon cited a recently published Seoul metropolitan government white paper on housing policy, urging, "The government and the ruling party must now acknowledge their failures and correct the course of their policies."

Mayor Oh posted a message on social media today (October 18) titled "I Recommend Reading Seoul's Confession," stating, "It has been exactly one year since the Lee Jae-myung administration announced the October 15 real estate measures, and the report card is too disastrous to bear open."

He criticized, "The government appears to have neither the courage to reflect on the past nor the will to face reality. Instead, the president and the Democratic Party are busy shifting the blame for the current housing supply cliff onto the incumbent mayor and evading responsibility."

He then introduced the white paper titled "Evaluation and Reflection on 20 Years of Seoul's Housing Supply Policy" released by the Seoul Metropolitan Government on October 16, evaluating it as "a remorseful confession in which Seoul city officials themselves looked back on the past and exposed the scars left by misguided policies just as they were."

Based on the contents of the white paper, Mayor Oh focused his criticism on the urban maintenance policies implemented during the tenure of the late former Mayor Park Won-soon.

He stated, "During Mayor Park Won-soon's term, 389 maintenance zones were canceled, causing the opportunity to supply 430,000 homes to vanish. At the time, it was a period when the construction economy was recovering from the aftermath of the financial crisis, and we were right in front of a golden age of supply."

In particular, he pointed out, "Places where promotion committees had already been formed and association establishment authorizations granted, as well as places that had even completed project implementation authorization, were all canceled indiscriminately. Out of the total, 41%, or 159 areas, were canceled even though the projects had progressed significantly."

Regarding the cancellation process, he also criticized, "There were cases hastily pushed forward using even the names of deceased people under the guise of resident opinion surveys, cases canceled by arbitrarily interpreting ordinances, and cases canceled by executive authority despite opposition from residents and autonomous districts."

He argued, "At the root of this was a hostile perspective that 'redevelopment and reconstruction are speculation.' The wrong decisions made 15 years ago have returned as the 'deletion of countless homes' that should have been supplied around now."

Introducing that the white paper was distributed to the offices of lawmakers belonging to the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee of the National Assembly last week, Mayor Oh recommended lawmakers from both ruling and opposition parties to read it.

In particular, addressing Democratic Party lawmakers, he emphasized, "Just as Seoul is confessing and reflecting on its past mistakes on its own, the government and the ruling party must now acknowledge their failures and correct the course of their policies."

He added, "Policies without self-reflection repeat failures, and the price always falls on the public. Instead of immersing yourselves in attacking me, please first look into the lives of citizens weighed down by housing prices."

(Photo: Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.