The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced Sunday it will launch an accelerated integration plan for its Moa Housing and Moa Town program to speed up development.
Moa Housing and Moa Town is a Seoul-style small-scale redevelopment initiative that consolidates aging low-rise residential plots — previously too small to develop individually — into a single living zone for integrated development.
For areas where projects are already underway, the city plans to advance ground-breaking through tighter progress management, targeting 14,000 units by 2028 and 40,000 units by 2031.
A "rapid ground-breaking progress meeting" involving the city and district offices will be held monthly to review the status of each zone, identify delays and devise support measures. The city's Moa Housing division chief and relevant district-level directors will be designated as "progress facilitation officers" to oversee detailed schedule management for each project zone.
In areas struggling with resident disputes, construction cost conflicts or relocation issues, the city will deploy a "mobile rapid resolution support team." Experts in architecture, urban renewal, law and accounting will conduct on-site inspections and provide professional consulting.
For new projects, the city will introduce a "Moa integrated planning" approach that runs multiple procedures — including management plan formulation and cooperative establishment — simultaneously to shorten the overall project timeline.
Teams comprising residents, the city, district offices, a Moa integrated planner and the Seoul Housing & Communities Corporation will lead the planning process.
Residents will handle cooperative establishment and project execution, while the city and district offices support plan formulation and the Moa integrated planner provides coordination and advisory services. The Seoul Housing & Communities Corporation will assist with feasibility analysis and, where needed, pursue joint project implementation.
Through this approach, the city aims to cut the time from planning to ground-breaking from roughly six years to four and a half years.
The city plans to solicit applications for new candidate sites under the integrated planning model, selecting 100 locations by 2030 and laying the groundwork for an additional 120,000 units of housing supply.
The city will also develop tailored regulations for the Moa Town program — including standard cooperative bylaws and standard construction contracts — to improve transparency in cooperative operations and help prevent disputes.
The city plans to expand rental housing options so that tenants displaced by Moa Town demolitions can move into redevelopment rental units, and will establish a verification system to reduce construction cost disputes.
To reduce confusion caused by misinformation in the early stages of projects, the city will hold resident briefing sessions under the name "Our Cooperative's First Steps." Projects that shorten timelines through swift execution or actively implement city policy will be designated as model Moa Town sites, with their best practices promoted to others.
"We will actively support everything from progress management to conflict resolution so that plans translate quickly into actual ground-breaking," said Myeong No-jun, head of the Seoul Metropolitan Government's housing bureau.
dlcw@heraldcorp.com
