Why Los Angeles should look towards Seoul for its housing crisis solution

Los Angeles might be able to look to Seoul to solve its housing crisis. 

High-rise apartment living in the South Korean capital has become the norm for the country over the past half-century, providing a stark contrast to Americans’ desire for single-family homes, The Los Angeles Times reported. 

Apartment living has become the pinnacle of middle-class homeownership in the country. “Apateu” communities come complete with amenities like a rock garden with a fake waterfall, on-site kindergartens, a playground, a gym, convenience stores, an administration office, a senior center and a “moms cafe,” providing residents with anything they could want within arm’s reach. 

Today, 64 percent of South Korean families live in multifamily housing, with most of them in apartment buildings five stories or taller. 

“The bigger the apartment complex, the better the surrounding infrastructure, like public transportation, schools, hospitals, grocery stories, parks and so on,” 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-hee told the L.A. Times. “I like how easy it is to communicate with the neighbors in the complex because there’s a well-run online community.”

Compare that with the city of Los Angeles, where nearly three-quarters of all residential land is zoned for stand-alone single-family homes despite a worsening housing and homelessness crisis. The city’s Housing Element requires the construction of 456,643 new housing units by 2029, but in order to make increased multifamily occupancy a reality, L.A. might have to look at Seoul and its own similar housing history. 

In the 1960s in South Korea, stand-alone single-family homes made up approximately 95 percent of homes in the country. But as citizens from the countryside flocked to the capital amid its industrialization boom, the population more than doubled, leading the government at the time to respond with an apartment building blitz. 

By relaxing height restrictions and providing incentives for construction companies, between 20,000 and 100,000 new apartment units were added to the capital’s housing stock each year. 

Single-family homes comprise about 10 percent of housing in Seoul today. It’s quite a reversal considering the capital is half the size of the city of Los Angeles but boasts nearly three times as many residents — 9.6 million versus 3.3 million.

Still, Seoul, like L.A., hasn’t been able to bring down affordability. The capital has one of the world’s most expensive price-per-square-meter rates for apartments, ranking fourth after Hong Kong, Zurich and Singapore and ahead of pricey U.S. cities like New York and San Francisco, according to a report from Deutsche Bank published last month. Buying an apartment there is seen as a more worthwhile and stable investment than any stock. 

“At the end of the day, apartments here are undoubtedly extremely convenient. That’s why they became so popular,” Jung Heon-mok, an anthropologist at the Academy of Korean Studies, told the Times. “But part of that convenience is because they insulate you from the concerns of the wider world. Once you’re inside your complex and in your home, you don’t have to pay attention to your neighbors or their issues.”

You have to take the good with the bad, Jung added. “I think apartments are partly why certain types of social inequalities you see in the U.S. are comparatively less severe in South Korea,” he said.

— Chris Malone Méndez