More households living in makeshift abodes despite rising housing supply

South Korea's housing penetration rate has well exceeded 100 percent, but there are over 300,000 households who live in makeshift or abnormal arrangements, three times more than five years ago, national statistics showed Monday.

Numbers provided by Statistics Korea said that as of November last year, 11,409 households lived in abodes with plastic roofs or made of planks. Another 30,131 households lived in motels and other types of accommodations. Statistics showed 322,591 households lived in temporary barracks built at construction sites, religious facilities, stores, saunas or on the streets.

In the last survey conducted five years ago, 117,115 households had lived in such conditions. In the new survey, the number jumped to 364,131.

Housing penetration rate measures the ratio of number of households to the number of housing available. The rate reached

101.9 percent in 2010 and rose to 103.5 percent in 2014. The latest survey results indicate that the rate increase is due to people owning a multiple number of homes, while the housing conditions for the poor have not improved.

Single-person households accounted for 43.5 percent of those living in makeshift arrangements. Close to 70 percent of such households lived in motel rooms or other forms of accommodations.

Gyeonggi Province, adjacent to Seoul, had the highest number of households in irregular housing, followed by the capital city of Seoul. (Yonhap)