Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon on the 6th lashed out at President Lee Jae-myung, saying that "repeatedly claiming a moral victory while ignoring even the facts in front of you will not change the outcome of a policy. It will only prolong the real estate hell the public is going through." The remarks came in a rebuttal to the president's statement a day earlier on X, formerly Twitter, pledging to keep his promise to free South Korea from being a republic of property speculation.
Writing on Facebook the same day, Oh said, "Looking at the several posts on real estate the president put up on social media yesterday, I even came to think there is no longer any point in trying to persuade him." He added, "With the president's narrow view — that rising home prices are the fault of speculators, that pointing out the side effects of a policy is resistance from vested interests, and that the public's cries of pain are backlash to be endured in the course of reform — there appears to be no hope going forward."
Oh said he could not help but scoff at the claim that the year-on-year increase in building permits and construction starts in Seoul and the wider metropolitan area was the result of the government's push for speed. "What kind of speed campaign has the government actually run?" he asked. "It takes more than 10 years on average from the formation of an association to the start of construction. Does the president have some magic lamp that produces permits and construction starts within a single year?"
"The reason permits and construction starts began delivering results in sequence from this year is that the Seoul city government worked day and night to restore redevelopment and reconstruction projects that had been uprooted and then sprayed with herbicide during Mayor Park Won-soon's tenure," he said. "Under Mayor Park, 389 projects covering 430,000 homes were canceled, but we designated 214 new sites and improved their financial viability, devoting all our efforts to creating conditions under which permits and construction starts could happen quickly." He added that the president's self-serving interpretation, which goes out of its way to ignore this process of normalizing supply, was "even pitiful."
Oh also criticized the president for airing what he called an unfounded binary view that conservative governments encouraged speculation while progressive governments curbed it. "What more can be expected of a president who cannot take even a single step away from viewing real estate through ideology rather than market principles?" he said. "By his own logic, home prices should have jumped under the conservative governments that supposedly encouraged speculation and stabilized under the progressive governments that supposedly curbed it. The reality is the exact opposite."
"Honestly admit the failure of the past year of real estate policy, correct the wrong direction and courageously declare that you will start over from scratch," Oh said. "Changing your thinking and changing your policy in the face of the public's suffering — that is the true courage the top official of the government can show," he wrote in closing.
In his post on X the previous day, Lee said that "setting aside conservative governments, which encourage property speculation, every progressive government has worked to curb real estate speculation but has failed to produce the results it aimed for." He added, "Please be patient and wait just a little longer. Judge us by the results."
