“Considering Relief of Housing Land Shortage by Deregulation on Agricultural Land”

Restrictions on agricultural land are expected to be alleviated in order to relieve the housing land shortage. Also, there will be more than 800,000 housing units provided specifically for the metropolitan area among the 1.5 million rental housing units that will be built within the next ten years.

Minister of Construction and Transportation, Choi Jong-chan, said at the breakfast meeting of Korea Employers Federation held at Shilla Hotel in Jangchung-dong, Chunggu, “Housing prices are rising because of a shortage of land for building houses. We are considering methods to alleviate the regulations on agricultural land in order to relieve the shortage of land for housing.”

Also, Minister Choi has said that the ministry is setting policies to build more than half of the total rental housings which are scheduled to be built within the next ten years inside the metropolitan area to provide relief for shortages in housing.

In regards to the policies to restrain housing prices, the minister said that its cause is analyzed to have been derived from the speculation demand in reconstruction in Gangnam, and the ministry is steadily promoting policies of: strengthening taxation such as increasing transfer income tax rate to restrain the speculation demand, restraining mortgage loans with real estate, deregulating on indirect investments in real estate, and others. In addition, in response to some people’s opinion, mainly held by elderly scholars, that transferring the administrative capital would be too costly and ineffective, he said, “4.5 billion won of the expected transferring costs sounds very excessive, but only 1.1 billion won of this is from the government. From the government’s perspective, the funding is not that burdensome, and we only have to work on setting the priorities.”

Jae-Seong Hwang jsonhng@donga.com