Korea’s National Association of Displaced Persons
While I was in the plane flying to Korea, a terrible accident occured on Hankangno (road) in Yongsan, Seoul.
A combination of skyrocketing property values, rampant land speculation, expectations of new and improved construction, extremely large construction companies, and a strong central government has led to very large-scale redevelopments of lower income neighborhoods into expansive apartement complexes that easily dwarf Stuyvesant Town and the largest public housing developments here in NYC. We’re probably talking Coop City sized areas. Here is a picture of one development I came across near the missus’ parents’ house.
I didn’t have my camera the day we walked through it, but the redevelopment project occupies the entire hillside. My father-in-law claimed that there are some 280 similar projects in Seoul alone, though I’m sure not all of them are on this scale.
There is a tradition of residents protesting and squatting to gain greater compensation from the government for its use of eminent domain. I’m not in a position at this time to evaluate the level of compensation, but I would not be surprised to find it below market value prior to redevelopment plans. The way the Korean system works generally benefits landowners and penalizes renters. Landowners are temporarily displaced–if they actually lived there in the first place–and then gain an apartment, which is generally of higher value, in the newly constructed complex. Renters, on the other hand, are provided a small amount to help them find a new apartment (I believe). Right-leaning media depict the protesting tenants as simply greedy and obstructing progress. The tenants are presumably trying to obtain more equitable compensation for relocating in a housing market that is increasingly beyond their reach. (In fact, there is almost certainly a housing bubble in which the production of non-affordable housing has outstripped the ability of the economy to produce effective demand. This is surely the case in a number of Korea’s smaller cities.)
Near the shmancy new Yongsan Railroad Station and its attendant mall, which my friend helped design, one such redevelopment project was underway. Here are two pictures of the traditional market, which has been completely trashed but is still indicative of the lower income population it used to serve.
Some tenants, business owners, and local employees were holding out in one building adjacent to the main road for greater compensation. Armed with molotov cocktails, they had be in a standoff with the police for twenty-four hours. Under the direction of Seoul’s chief of police, Baek Dong-san, who has already been accused of excessive violence during the protests against the new administration’s policies in the spring and is currently in the midst of hearings to become the national chief of police, a crane lowered 100 commandoes in a container box onto the five-storey building’s roof while 1400 riot police waited nearby. In the ensuing melee, fuel supplies on the roof caught fire, engulfed the top of the building in flames in minutes, and killed five protesters and one policeman, injuring 23 others.
This was naturally a topic of conversation at the conference I was at, as the conference was focusing on the experience of foreign countries in redevelopment and revitalization in order to inform Korea’s efforts in this regard. And this is where it got more interesting. Our hosts, who are generally progressive, echoed the position of the more conservative papers: the redevelopment was moving forward peacefully until “outside influences” intervened. That outside influence is the National Association of Displaced Persons (Korean:???????). From their website, they appear to me to be a pro-poor, tenants’ rights organization that emerged from a number of disparate movements in the early 1990s. They liken the takeover of poor neighborhoods by “monopoly capital and government dictatorship” to similar displacements by Japanese imperialist forces during their occupation of Korea in the first half of the 20th century. According to JYK, the conservative papers, for their part, claim that the national network is essentially an extortion racket that takes money from local groups to provide them with technical assistance in protest practices and then winds the protest down when the developers bribe them with enough cash. I do not yet know enough to discern the truth, but I’m guessing the group is being maligned.
Meanwhile, the basic point of our presentation at the conference was that the most efficient and best designed redevelopment projects emerge when community groups and civil society a incorporated on equal footing from the beginning. In response, one professor claimed that because of the frequent movement of the population, Korea had not developed the same tradition of civil society (or perhaps he meant community-based organizations) that was present in the US. In the heat of defending our argument that government policies can be designed to incorporate community from the start, I missed the now obvious fact that DS insightfully pointed out later: the National Association of Displaced Persons is precisely the kind of local civil society organization that needs to be consulted. Doing so would minimize protest, increase efficiency, and most importantly result in greater equity.
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