Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon said Thursday's Public Forum on Real Estate Normalization reaffirmed his long-held view that housing problems must be solved through supply, not taxes and regulation.
Oh wrote on Facebook that he had repeatedly argued real estate issues should be addressed through supply rather than taxes and regulation, and that the voices heard at Thursday's forum confirmed that direction was correct. The forum featured accounts from a young person who could not find a jeonse unit and was ultimately forced into monthly rent, a resident weighing whether to leave Seoul as jeonse and monthly-rent listings disappear, and an elderly homeowner worried about having to sell a lifelong home because of tax burdens.
"The stories were all different, but what they shared was a desperate wish to protect ordinary life," Oh wrote. He said residents simply wanted to keep living in the neighborhoods where they had long put down roots, spend their retirement years comfortably near their children, and enjoy a somewhat cleaner and safer environment — desires he called entirely reasonable and modest. He added that the most sobering message from the forum was that government policy appears to lack any meaningful response to the jeonse and monthly-rent market, which directly affects the lives of low-income renters without homes of their own.
"Housing policy must ultimately be policy for people's lives," Oh said, stressing that sufficiently supplying homes where people want to live and in the form they want must be the most fundamental starting point of any housing policy. He said experts and citizens at Thursday's forum converged on a single view: if the government demonstrates a clear will and a concrete plan to expand supply, market anxiety will stabilize far more quickly than expected.
Oh said the Seoul Metropolitan Government would compile every opinion raised Thursday without exception and deliver them to the central government. He pledged to formally request improvements to any system that deepens residential insecurity among citizens and to push for the removal of regulations that obstruct housing supply.
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