[Editorial] No more ‘new towns’

The ambitious urban redevelopment projects that President Lee Myung-bak launched as Seoul mayor a decade ago are being phased out in disgrace. Park Won-soon, the incumbent mayor, says he will discontinue most of them with approval from residents. He says his metropolitan government will help residents repair their shoddy homes, instead of supporting massive urban redevelopment projects.

Left behind are displaced residents and investors that have sustained huge losses. Who will have to be held accountable for the policy failure? More importantly, who will have to finance the task of cleaning up the mess? The Lee administration has turned down Park’s call for financial support.

A decade ago, the idea of bulldozing dilapidated one-story houses and building new multi-story apartment buildings in run-down residential areas was undoubtedly appealing to Lee, a homebuilder-turned mayor. Such urban renewal projects could be launched at little cost to his metropolitan government.

With this idea in mind in 2002, Lee started pilot projects for urban redevelopment in three shantytowns. In launching the projects, he was apparently guided by the experience of building large apartment complexes he had gained as chief executive officer of Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co.

Homeowners in the shoddy residential areas welcomed the projects, and urban developers poured money into them in anticipation of a property boom. Who wouldn’t when the mere designation of a shantytown as a candidate for urban renewal raised the value of a house in the area by hundreds of millions of won?

With the success of the pilot projects beyond expectations, the Seoul metropolitan government under Mayor Lee and his successor, Oh Se-hoon, started urban renewal programs in earnest, many of them in the name of “new town” projects.

The fever for urban renewal culminated in early 2008 when members of the ruling Grand National Party running for election to the National Assembly promised to launch new town projects in their electoral districts with support from Oh. No other single electoral issue helped the party win a landslide victory in Seoul as much as the promise to build new towns.

But it did not take long before the property market came tumbling down. Home prices plunged when the global financial crisis began to set in with Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy in September 2008. The 1,300 urban renewal projects, either under way or on the drawing board, came to a sudden halt.

The projects, once regarded as geese laying golden eggs, turned into formidable liabilities for ruling party lawmakers elected in Seoul. With their reelections being threatened, the lawmakers tried in vain to salvage the moribund projects.

The lawmakers submitted a bill to subsidize the projects and double the ratio of the total floor area of the buildings to the size of the land on which they were built ― a gimmick designed to double the number of apartments to be built in the districts for urban renewal and, by doing so, make the projects profitable. But they failed to bring the bill to a vote on the floor in the face of public outcry.

Now those lawmakers will have to fend for themselves if they are nominated for the April elections. The issues concerning the projects, which will certainly come to the fore during the run-up to the elections, will undoubtedly haunt them.

Mayor Park, an independent planning to join the main opposition Democratic United Party soon, has already launched a salvo, criticizing the projects for lining the pockets of urban developers and property speculators at the expense of homeowners and renters. While promising to scrap most of the projects, he says his metropolitan government will focus on rebuilding communities, subsidizing home repairs and building child care and other public facilities.

Despite his lofty goals of assisting the underprivileged, he will also have to take his policy’s downside into consideration ― a steep rise in rent and home prices. The scrapping of the urban renewal projects will result in a shortage of new homes in the long run, threatening to trigger a new round of property speculation.