'No longer meaningful to try to persuade the president'

'Permit and ground-breaking results are the fruit of Seoul's own efforts'

'President has lost confidence in his real estate policy'

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon tours the exhibition hall at the 2026 Smart Life Week event held at COEX in Samseong-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, on Tuesday. [Yonhap]
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon tours the exhibition hall at the 2026 Smart Life Week event held at COEX in Samseong-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, on Tuesday. [Yonhap]

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon said he finds President Lee Jae Myung's view of real estate policy so absurd it leaves him laughing in disbelief, adding that the recent gains in housing permits and ground-breakings are the result of the Seoul Metropolitan Government's round-the-clock efforts to rebuild a redevelopment pipeline that was gutted under former Mayor Park Won-soon.

Oh wrote on his SNS account Tuesday that reading the president's multiple real estate-related posts on Monday had left him feeling it was "no longer meaningful to try to persuade the president." He said Lee's "narrow-minded perception" — blaming speculators when home prices rise, calling critics of policy side effects defenders of vested interests, and dismissing public hardship as inevitable resistance to reform — offered no hope going forward.

Oh said he could only laugh when he read Lee's claim that year-on-year increases in permits and ground-breakings in Seoul and the greater metropolitan area were thanks to the government's "blitz." "What blitz, exactly, did the government carry out?" Oh wrote. "It takes an average of more than 10 years from forming a redevelopment association to breaking ground. Does the president have a magic lamp that conjures up permits and ground-breakings within a single year?"

He said the permit and ground-breaking results that have begun to emerge this year are the product of Seoul's tireless work to restore a redevelopment sector that was "uprooted and sprayed with herbicide" during the Park administration. Oh said 389 redevelopment projects covering 430,000 units were canceled under Park, but the city had since designated 214 new zones and improved project viability to create conditions for permits and ground-breakings to proceed as quickly as possible.

Oh said Seoul plans to break ground on 85 zones totaling 85,000 units by 2028, and that this was "not an achievement built overnight." He said it was "almost pitiable" to watch the president ignore the process of supply normalization and offer a self-serving interpretation of the results.

Oh said he could not see what more could be expected of a president who had "not taken a single step away from viewing real estate through ideology rather than market principles." He said that if the president's logic held, home prices should have surged under conservative governments that supposedly encourage speculation and stabilized under progressive governments that claim to suppress it — "but the reality is exactly the opposite."

"I believe the president has lost confidence in his real estate policy," Oh said. He added that the louder the rhetoric about cracking down on speculators and the more the policy is packaged as "reform," the more it signals that the administration's real estate policy is heading toward failure.

In closing, Oh urged the president to "honestly acknowledge the failure of the past year's real estate policy, declare with courage that you will correct the wrong direction and start over from scratch." He said that changing one's thinking and policy in the face of public suffering was "the truest form of courage a head of state can show."


ikson@heraldcorp.com