Only 1 of 136 designated Moa Town sites has broken ground; integrated construction could save 21.1 billion won, lawmaker says
Grouped into a single redevelopment zone but built separately, sharing common facilities while each bearing its own costs — that is the reality of Seoul's Moa Town program, the city's flagship alternative for upgrading aging low-rise residential neighborhoods. Despite expectations that consolidating project zones would improve efficiency, critics say the individual cooperative-centered structure has instead driven up construction costs and slowed progress.
Oh Jung-seok, a Democratic Party of Korea lawmaker on the Seoul Metropolitan Council's Housing and Space Committee representing Dongdaemun 2, called for a fundamental overhaul of the program's operating structure Wednesday during an administrative audit of the Housing Bureau at the 340th regular session. He argued the city must move beyond simply bundling redevelopment zones and instead manage permitting, construction and shared-facility operations as a single integrated project.
"If you gather individual homes, you get Moa Housing — but if you gather Moa Housing units separately, you just end up with Apart Town," Oh said, pointing to what he described as a structural contradiction at the heart of the Moa Town policy.
Seoul has concentrated its policy efforts on expanding Moa Town designations. Since the program launched in 2022, the city has designated 136 sites, surpassing its original target of 100 sites over five years. This year it also introduced integrated planning, construction cost verification by SH Corporation, standard bylaws and standard construction contracts to bolster the support framework.
But Oh said there is a significant gap between the number of designations and actual housing supply.
The city's plan, announced in August, to break ground on 40,000 Moa Housing units across 146 sites by 2031 covers only sites that have already received cooperative establishment approval. Of those, 103 sites remain at the cooperative establishment stage.
Oh pressed officials on whether the city had simply recycled past cooperative establishment figures as new groundbreaking targets. The head of the Housing Bureau said that appeared to be the case. It was also confirmed that the city has not separately calculated the net increase in housing supply after excluding existing units.
Project timelines further exposed the gap between targets and reality. City data show an average of 64 months elapses between cooperative establishment and groundbreaking, yet 30 sites still at the cooperative stage are targeting construction starts in 2027 or 2028.
"It's like promising to drive a route your navigation says takes 64 minutes — in one or two years," Oh said, calling on the city to draw up realistic project schedules and supply plans.
In fact, only one of the 136 designated Moa Town sites — in Beon-dong, Gangbuk-gu — has broken ground. Oh also flagged that the city's own documents cite conflicting groundbreaking figures of 14, 8 and 1, meaning there is not even a consistent standard for measuring progress.
Particularly striking is the pace of projects inside Moa Town zones compared with those outside. According to data Oh presented, among 195 Moa Housing sites, 43.8 percent of those outside Moa Town zones had reached the project implementation approval stage or beyond, while only 10.4 percent of those inside had done so. The consolidation process appears to be slowing projects down rather than speeding them up, though Oh noted that a fair comparison would require controlling for designation timing.
On project costs, Oh presented specific figures to illustrate the economic case for integrated construction.
Under the current structure, each cooperative within a Moa Town selects its own contractor even though the zones share underground parking and common facilities. When contractors differ across adjacent sites, construction methods and specifications diverge, and separate labor and equipment must be deployed for each.
An analysis by Oh's office, based on a hypothetical scenario of nine cooperatives each with 400 units — 3,600 units in total — found that the legally required minimum staffing for separate construction would be 81 workers. Consolidating the sites into a single project would reduce that to 31.
Over a 30-month construction period, eliminating duplicate labor costs of 11.8 billion won ($8.6 million) and per-site overhead of 9.3 billion won would yield total savings of 21.1 billion won — equivalent to about 5.86 million won per unit and about 8.38 million won per cooperative member.
The figures are estimates based on assumptions set by Oh's office, but they illustrate how much the project structure can affect the financial burden on cooperative members.
"Integration is not about cutting safety personnel — it's about eliminating fragmented duplication," Oh said, calling for an institutional framework to reduce the repeated labor and cost burdens across individual project sites.
Oh also raised concerns about on-site safety management. He said there are reports from the field that site managers and safety officers are registered on paper to meet per-cooperative staffing requirements but are not actually present. Without asserting the allegations as fact, he called for joint inspections involving local district offices and the Ministry of Employment and Labor to verify whether required personnel are physically on site.
Conflicts among cooperatives over shared facilities also emerged as an unresolved issue. Even in Beon-dong, Gangbuk-gu — the first Moa Town site — five zones failed to unite under a single architectural agreement and instead split into two, with disputes over the location and management of shared amenities such as fitness centers driving the divide.
Oh identified the lack of real decision-making authority in the multi-cooperative consultative body as the root cause. Even when cooperatives jointly draw up a management plan, he said, conflicts will keep recurring without a legally empowered entity to make final decisions on contractor selection, facility placement and project scheduling.
A blind spot in relocation support policy also came to light. The 6 billion won budget allocated this year for relocation loans under small-scale redevelopment projects was limited in practice to reconstruction and redevelopment projects, leaving 1,450 cooperative members across 10 Moa Housing zones ineligible. Oh said this has pushed the relocation schedule for seven of those zones back to February next year.
To address these problems, Oh proposed five reforms: unifying permitting at the Moa Town level; consolidating construction under a single contractor; delegating authority to the consultative body contingent on 65 percent cooperative member consent; using outside experts to resolve disputes over shared-facility placement; and eliminating duplicate staffing while strengthening on-site safety inspections.
The head of the Housing Bureau said he agreed with the intent of the proposals but noted that the current legal framework, which requires separate permitting for each individual project, limits how far integration can go.
In response, Oh called on the city to move immediately on measures within its own authority — revising standard bylaws, introducing incentives for integrated construction, adjusting shared-facility placement and conducting joint on-site inspections — while formally requesting legislative changes from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Ministry of Employment and Labor.
The issues raised in the audit point to a broader question about how to measure the success of the Moa Town policy: whether the city will continue to count zone designations and cooperative approvals as achievements, or shift its focus to accelerating actual groundbreaking and move-in timelines while reducing the financial burden on residents.
"If we gathered individual homes to create Moa Housing, it is now time to truly bring that Moa Housing together," Oh said.
7toy7@heraldcorp.com
