An aerial view of the Changneung third-generation new town site in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province. [Yonhap]
An aerial view of the Changneung third-generation new town site in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province. [Yonhap]

The government plans to move up ground-breaking schedules for third-generation new towns and other major development zones by one to two years to accelerate housing supply. Sites in Gwacheon and Taereung announced under the Jan. 29 supply measures will see faster delivery through inter-agency cooperation. The government will also create a new category of long-term public rental housing for youth and middle-income households to ease the jeonse and monthly rent crunch in key Seoul and Gyeonggi Province areas, and will launch a jeonse safety trust program in the second half of this year to strengthen the residential safety net.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport presented these plans to President Lee Jae Myung on Thursday in a work report themed "Building the Future, Connecting Everyone." The briefing — the second since Lee took office — was held to review the implementation of policies and national agenda items reported by each ministry at the end of last year and to discuss the direction of future policy.

The ministry laid out a roadmap built around four reform pillars: region-led growth centered on five economic poles and three special zones, structural reform of land and transport services, normalization of illegal and irregular practices, and the "ilhwaenghaeng" (one-action execution) initiative. It also identified four strategic priorities: residential stability, inclusive growth, transport innovation and future growth.

On the housing front, the ministry said it would bring forward the supply of private and public housing in high-demand locations. Beyond accelerating the third-generation new towns, it plans to shorten the time needed to break ground on redevelopment projects through legislative amendments that streamline relocation support and approval procedures. The ministry also intends to expand the conversion of long-neglected non-residential land to housing use and said it will release a list of new candidate sites for urban mixed-use development projects within Seoul this month.

The ministry also aims to create a new type of rental housing targeting youth, newlyweds and middle-income households. The new category would offer affordable, high-quality long-term public rental units and improve the public housing support framework by linking eligibility to income and asset levels. Lee Yu-ri, head of the ministry's housing policy division, said at a briefing Wednesday that "the new type is being designed so that a significant portion can be offered to young people."

The reform committee of Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH), which launched last August and has been operating for nearly a year, is also set to release a blueprint for its reform plan in September.

The work report also included several measures to prevent jeonse fraud and support victims. To protect jeonse deposits, the ministry is drawing up a safety trust scheme under which a jeonse stabilization agency would manage tenants' deposits while landlords receive monthly returns. The structure — in which landlords earn operating income rather than monthly rent — is designed to encourage the conversion of monthly-rent listings into jeonse contracts.

The ministry said it will refine the relevant systems ahead of the minimum-guarantee scheme for jeonse fraud victims, which takes effect in November, and will provide a pan-government data-linked risk-diagnosis service to root out jeonse fraud.

To expand residential welfare, the ministry plans to increase the number of households eligible for housing benefit subsidies from 1.95 million last year to 2.12 million this year. It will also review the public housing support framework to better reflect the characteristics of younger people, who tend to have higher incomes but fewer accumulated assets.

The ministry also outlined measures to crack down on illegal real estate practices. To break up licensed real estate agent cartels — including restrictions on joint brokerage for agents not affiliated with industry associations — it will impose penalties on those who obstruct other operators regardless of whether the obstructing party can be proven to belong to an organized group. For redevelopment projects, which have seen frequent corruption, the ministry will punish the forgery or alteration of electronic votes and take strict action in coordination with the Real Estate Supervisory Service.

With all of Seoul and 15 areas in Gyeonggi Province currently designated as land transaction permit zones, the ministry will make deferred-residency declarations mandatory and strengthen on-site inspections to prevent fraudulent practices such as sham address registrations during the grace period for actual occupancy. To close regulatory loopholes that allow developers to circumvent the ban on projects of 500,000 square meters or more in the greater Seoul area's natural conservation zone by splitting them into smaller parcels, the ministry will aggregate the total development area of similar-type projects when applying the threshold.

Meanwhile, the government has been sending repeated market signals of expanded housing supply as real estate instability deepens across the greater Seoul area, with purchase prices, jeonse and monthly rents all rising in tandem. Kim Yong-beom, the Cheong Wa Dae policy chief, underscored the urgency at a Kwanhun Club forum on June 24, saying the country must "just shut up and build" and that "extraordinary measures to increase supply must be discussed."


hwshin@heraldcorp.com
smh@heraldcorp.com