South Korean Cultural Ecology - 1905 to 1990
Part 2: "Change to the Industrial Society" - Page 13

G. Worker Housing

The unbridled pursuit of wealth by the upper class through various privileges and their conspicuous consumption fanned the feeling of relative poverty among the ordinary people. This anger was further inflamed by a crisis in home ownership that worsened in the mid-1980s. In a country as small as Korea, land is vital to power and wealth. The chaebols own 75% of private land. That 75% of the land is owned by 6% of the people. In 1991 the chaebols were forced to sell land to help ease the land market. By 1985 over 6 million people were renting, squatting or homeless. The poorest 30% of the population have an average of two square meters per person and three families per house. Estimates are that Seoul has 2 million squatters out of a total population of 9.6 million. Evictions for the 1988 Olympics, in the name of beautification, removed 3.5 million people from 230 slums.

These squatters live in fear of having their shacks torn down by the authorities. These shantytowns started during the first phase of the export-oriented industrialization, by people evicted from the old urban center and the rural migrants who came into Seoul to find jobs. The rural percentage went from 76% and 16 million out of a total population of 21 million in 1955, to less than half that number of people living in rural villages and small towns and they were only 18% of the population. In the year 2000 it is projected to be 23% and 10 million rural out of a total population of 46 million. The price of an average small apartment in Seoul reached $225,000 in 1989. This is about the same as San Francisco, CA, in a country with a per capita GNP of $5000.