[Captured from JTBC's 'Sageon Banjang']
[Captured from JTBC's 'Sageon Banjang']

Residents of a villa in Gangnam, Seoul, have been enduring years of disruption caused by a man who has been living in the building's parking lot for four years.

According to JTBC's "Sageon Banjang," a TV news magazine program, on Tuesday a tip was received about a man who has been living in a villa in Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, since 2022.

The building has a piloti structure, with the ground floor used as a parking lot and nine households occupying the floors above. The tipster's father-in-law rents out one of the units there. In the parking lot, the man had stacked discarded cardboard and paper boxes to form makeshift walls and set up a tent and a cot, in effect turning the shared space into a living area.

According to the tipster, the man took up residence in the ground-floor parking lot around 2022.

When a reporting crew visited, the man was drawing power from the building's shared electrical supply to cook rice in a rice cooker, and running an electric fan in summer and a space heater in winter.

"In summer he burns mosquito coils and runs several fans around him," one tenant said. "I'm so scared a fire could break out at any moment that I've even started looking into moving out."

Fed-up tenants ultimately decided to stop paying the shared electricity bill, and the power supply has since been cut off.

Residents also complained about the parking shortage. The man's belongings have taken up so much space that the lot, which once accommodated seven to eight vehicles, can now fit only three or four.

The building management posted notices demanding the removal of items left unattended in the shared parking lot for an extended period, but to no avail.

Last month, the exasperated tipster went directly to the man and asked him to clear out his belongings, citing the lack of parking space and sanitation concerns.

The man said he had previously run a moving company and claimed that the former owners of the property, before the building was constructed, had given him permission to store items in the parking lot.

When the tipster countered that none of the current building owners had granted any such permission, the man said, "I'll tidy up once I'm feeling a bit better," and added, "I can only say I'm sorry" — then refused to leave.

The tipster asked Gangnam-gu district office and police for help, saying the goal was not to simply drive the man away but to connect him with appropriate support services and restore normal use of the parking lot. The district office replied that it had no authority to forcibly remove or dispose of personal belongings on private property. Police said they also found it difficult to intervene.

Fire department authorities said the items did not obstruct any evacuation routes and therefore did not constitute a violation of fire safety regulations, adding that they had no separate legal authority to take action under current law.

A Gangnam-gu district office official told the production crew that the complaint received last month had been reviewed and that the office was considering how to handle it. "We will take action as quickly as possible," the official said.


min3654@heraldcorp.com