President Yoon Suk Yeol said Wednesday that his administration would push to ease regulations concerning the redevelopment of apartment buildings aged 30 years or older, by allowing projects to go ahead even if the existing buildings are safe for habitation.
Any residential complex built before 1994 may apply for reconstruction. Previously, owners of the apartment units had to get a municipality's approval that the buildings in the complex were dangerous to live in, no matter how old they were, to get a regulatory nod for a redevelopment project.
The plan is to improve housing quality and to address housing shortage, he added.
Yoon's policy drive is likely to benefit property owners, who often hope for sharp increases in property values through housing redevelopment schemes. Meanwhile, Yoon said the projects would offer residents a wider range of options for their residences depending on the size of their households.
"Any worn-out homes that are 30 years old or older than that will be rebuilt without going through a (regulatory) safety check," Yoon told some 120 participants in Goyang, a satellite city of Seoul in northwestern Gyeonggi Province, planned in the late 1980s to resolve Seoul's housing shortage and opened in 1992, in the second session of a series of public debates.
Yoon announced last week that there would be a series of 10 public debates involving government officials and residents instead of ministerial New Year's briefings this year.
Yoon said the redevelopment of residential areas will speed up, along with plans to make projects more lucrative for builders, by allowing builders to stack more floors on a building than could previously be done. The president also unveiled plans to create a 12 trillion-won ($9 billion) fund to give builders more financial breathing room.
The Yoon administration aims to shorten the time it takes to redevelop areas by three years. The existing procedure is believed to take at least a decade.
Following Yoon's remarks, Land Minister Park Sang-woo briefed plans to ease regulations on homebuilding to boost housing supply, a different approach to the previous Moon Jae-in administration's stance, which focused on tightening rules to curb real estate speculation.
"An ample housing supply should be made to meet citizens' demand for (better housing conditions)," Park said. "Any redevelopment process will be accelerated, and these projects will no longer be subject to regulations, and instead we will be supportive of these projects."
Park succeeded Won Hee-ryong as land minister, when Won resigned to run for a parliamentary seat in the April general election.
Yoon's comment came after he visited a Baeksong Village apartment complex in Goyang that failed to gain regulatory approval for a redevelopment project in November 2022. A third-party safety assessment found that the apartment complex was safe, so it did not need to be rebuilt.
Baeksong Village is a group of apartment complexes constructed in late 1980s to early 1990s through the first-phase New Town initiative to supply over 2 million houses during the former Roh Tae-woo administration.
Redevelopment of apartment complexes built during the first-phase New Town initiative will begin in 2027, with the goal of completion by 2030, Park said. First-phase New Towns developed to tackle Seoul's housing shortage in the late 1980s and opened in the early 1990s also include other satellite cities of Seoul in Gyeonggi Province, such as Bundang, Pyeongchon, Sanbon and Bucheon's Jung-dong.
