'The president alone is living in a different world'

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon. [Yonhap]
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon. [Yonhap]

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon on Tuesday sharply criticized President Lee Jae Myung over remarks about preparing for a potential housing price collapse, saying Lee should "just stay quiet" if he has no intention of facing reality.

Oh made the remarks in a Facebook post titled "Is the president alone living in a different world?" He said Lee was "completely disregarding the public" by ignoring the real estate market that people actually live in and instead cherry-picking a few favorable figures to mislead the public on the housing outlook.

"Seoul apartment prices have risen for 90 consecutive weeks, and this year's rate of increase is the highest on record — where exactly did you see signs of a housing price collapse?" Oh said. He added that Lee appeared firmly convinced prices would fall, given that the president had even cited claims that housing prices could drop to an unbearable degree.

Oh then asked whether price corrections in some high-end properties in the Gangnam area and the Han River belt were behind that conviction. "Do you consider it a success in controlling housing prices when people simply cannot buy homes because lending has been cut off?" he said. He also asked whether Lee could only see the numbers he wanted to see while remaining blind to jeonse and monthly rent prices surging day after day.

"People are anxious every single day, wondering when the jeonse and monthly rent bomb will go off — and yet the president is somehow worried about a housing price collapse. I simply cannot understand what he is looking at," Oh said. He said it was as if everyone was fighting to put out a fire at their feet while the president alone was preparing for a flood.

Oh also took issue with what he described as an attempt to shift blame onto Seoul for a decline in housing permits that began in 2022. "Does the president still want to look away from where the drop in permits actually started?" he said. He noted that 389 redevelopment zones were dissolved during the tenure of former Mayor Park Won-soon, wiping out the opportunity to supply 430,000 units of housing. "If those zones had not been dissolved, they could have led to permits and ground-breakings. You pulled out the seeds, so of course there is nothing to harvest," he said.

Oh said his administration had worked around the clock to revive the collapsed supply base — redesignating zones, improving project viability and pushing projects through to permits and ground-breakings. "Now that results are finally beginning to show, they claim permits have normalized under this government. That goes beyond shamelessness — it turns the facts on their head," he said.

"I understand the urge to blame others for rising housing prices, but the more you do that, the more you should reflect on what you yourself have done," Oh said. He argued that this government's fixation on owner-occupancy had fueled what experts and ordinary citizens alike now describe as a "triple surge" — simultaneous rises in home prices, jeonse prices and monthly rents. "And yet the president seizes every opportunity to blame others, and is now preparing to fight an imaginary real estate market that has nothing to do with the reality people are living," he said.

Earlier Tuesday, President Lee chaired a Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae, where he said actual transaction prices in key areas were falling "at a surprising rate" and that it was important to ensure the public had direct access to accurate data. He also said he saw signs that those who benefit from rising housing prices were pushing a one-sided narrative by selectively using certain statistics, and stressed the importance of making precise data directly accessible to the public.


cook@heraldcorp.com