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Seoul neighborhood of Bogwang-dong sits on a steep hill rising over the Han River. In Korean, neighborhoods built on hazardous slopes are called dal-dongnae, or moon villages, because they seem to reach into the sky. Dal-dongnae are a legacy of the waves of rapid urbanization that drew millions of rural residents into the capital during the 20th century. Seoul’s landscape is defined by the contrast between the uniformity of its aspirationally-branded apartment complexes — Summit La Fiume, Lotte Castle, Mecenatpolis — and the sprawling mass of aging working-class neighborhoods that lie between the towers.
Houses snake up the hill in Bogwang-dong through a cobweb of nearly invisible lanes, filled with the signs of progress and destruction: yellow tape over buildings, security guards keeping watch over this valuable ground. Garbage was never really picked up in the neighborhood, but now it overflows, blocking narrow alleys with its bulk, born of lives crumpled quickly; family photos, empty wardrobes, brightly colored blankets fading in the sun.
All of this detritus will soon disappear, just as most of its owners have, swallowed whole by 197 luxury apartment towers and a vast shopping mall. The old Bogwang-dong’s replacement is a $5.1 billion project called The H Hannam, the largest housing development in Seoul’s history. A promotional video for The H shows the new features that will replace the old neighborhood’s humble landmarks (hilltop church, market, hip record store): an infinity pool, artificial mountain valley, and a “forest terrace” complete with a funicular to assist residents in climbing the complex’s slopes. The very name of the area will change—while most of the project sits within Bogwang-dong, The H Hannam takes its moniker from neighboring Hannam-dong, an enclave home to captains of industry and top K-pop stars.
Bogwang-dong turned into an urban village in the 1910s, when residents displaced by the construction of a Japanese military base settled in the area. Today, the neighborhood lies in the very center of the city, but for most of Seoul’s history it was outside the city walls. Despite heavy bombing by United Nations forces that left the neighborhood smoldering for days, the population of Bogwang-dong boomed following the 1950-1953 Korean War.
The neighborhood has since served as home to generations of people on the margins of Seoul. North Korean exiles settled in Bogwang-dong, followed by sex workers catering to U.S. soldiers in the nearby Itaewon red-light district and laborers at small factories that dotted the hill. Since the 1990s, a sizable Muslim immigrant community has grown around the Seoul Central Mosque, which sits at the edge of the redevelopment zone. More recently, a small cadre of bohemians opened galleries and coffee shops along ramshackle Usadan Road, drawn by some of the cheapest rents in central Seoul. When “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho showed a New York Times reporter around Seoul in 2015, he made a beeline for Bogwang-dong.
The H is being hailed in the local media as the biggest housing project since Dangun, the mythical king who founded the first Korean kingdom in 2333 BC. A project on this scale has not been seen in the West since 20th-century slum clearances. Roughly 8,300 households will leave in total; the vast majority are tenants who will not profit from the project and have received scant or nonexistent relocation support.
The value of the neighborhood, though, will be reborn, as The H will have the highest sales price per square foot of any new apartment complex in Seoul. Property prices are a national obsession in South Korea. The local stock market, sensitive to geopolitical jitters and perceptions of poor corporate governance, suffers from perennially poor returns relative to the financial performance of the country’s top conglomerates like Samsung, LG, and Hyundai Motors. Apartments take the place of retirement funds for those without a pension — just like its elderly poverty rate, South Korea’s household debt-to-GDP ratio is the highest in the developed world, fueled by real estate speculation. Tips on redevelopment areas are traded in hush tones elsewhere reserved for insider trading; YouTubers talk about the most promising apartment complexes as if they were ranking meme stocks. While South Korea’s apartment complexes are often lambasted as symbols of conformity, their standardized nature makes them ideal financial products.
“Redevelopment of poor neighborhoods… basically became the norm due to the historical experiences of how this actually worked in the best interests of the state, the private sector, and the middle classes,” said Hyun Bang Shin, a professor of geography and urban studies at the London School of Economics whose work focuses on the political economy of housing in Asia. “The increase in housing price in the condominium sector throughout the years, kind of created this conviction that this is the most desirable type of housing that can safeguard the asset that many families were trying to accumulate.”
The pressure for apartments to deliver massive financial returns is generating feverish speculation about The H’s potential. The project sits across the Han River from Gangnam, whose development from an expanse of rice paddies in the 1970s to a forest of apartments represents South Korea’s most transformative property boom.
Hannam The H is only the first of a series of apartment complexes planned as part of the larger Hannam New Town project, which was launched in 2003. The full project incorporates six districts, all of which are in different stages of development. The H will be built in Hannam District 3, where regulatory approval is proceeding at the fastest pace. Hannam New Town languished in planning hell for decades, leaving local tenants and business owners confused about whether the neighborhood would ever be demolished. Most of the residents I spoke to put the Hannam New Town project out of their minds, as did I while I lived in the area for several years. The plan to ultimately demolish over a square kilometer of bustling life and commerce in the middle of Seoul seemed absurd; no specifics, such as the construction company involved or blueprints, were ever presented to residents for decades.
Kim Bun-sun lives in redevelopment District 4, just over the border from District 3. Kim, 91, arrived in the 1970s from North Jeolla province, a breadbasket region of South Korea that was then poor and underdeveloped. She worked as a maid to raise her nine children. Now, she faces eventual eviction from the home she’s lived in since the 1990s.
“My son in Canada told me we can go somewhere else in five years,” Kim told me. “I don’t want to. I’ll die here.”
In Hannam District 3, most of the residents are already gone. Those who have not left are largely elderly. On a trip to the neighborhood in late May, a man snored on the terrace of one building clearly marked as uninhabited and ready for demolition. A woman washing green onions outside the Jumi Apartment building, built in 1973, said she was overwhelmed by the level of documentation required for relocation support.
Cho Jum-sun was born in 1936 in Bogwang-dong, where she lived all her life and eventually served as head of the local senior citizen’s association. Cho witnessed the occupation of the neighborhood in 1950 by North Korean soldiers, made matches and chalk in local factories, and cooked for soldiers in the nearby U.S. military base. She is one of several homeowners suing the District 3 homeowners union, which organized the redevelopment plan, alleging that they misrepresented the value of their homes to convince them to sell early. Under South Korea’s Act on the Improvement of Urban Areas and Residential Environments, homeowners, like tenants, have no choice about whether to remain in their homes. Everyone must leave.
Kicking residents out of Bogwang-dong is easier than many redevelopment areas around Seoul due to the high proportion of short-term tenants. This transient population includes immigrants without legal status, young people sharing apartments, and day laborers working on construction sites for the speculative apartments they will never afford. But short-term is relative—only tenants who lived in their homes before 2009 are eligible for compensation and aid finding a new apartment. Those who’ve lived in the same home for fifteen years will be treated as if they arrived yesterday.
In addition to a host of Korean shamanic sites and Christian churches, Seoul’s Muslim community is leaving Bogwang-dong, too. In 1976, Saudi Arabia and a host of other Muslim countries provided money to build South Korea’s first mosque at the edge of the neighborhood, which was then dominated by the presence of the nearby U.S. base. The redevelopment area hosts a vibrant community, with halal butchers, restaurants, and community organizations, many of them abutting the neighborhood’s transgender and gay bars. On Friday prayers the energy emanating from the mosque is intoxicating, with hundreds of people spilling out onto the streets.
Kim Kihack, who spent years living in Egypt as a community health worker, established Baraka Little Library in 2018 after returning to South Korea. The library helps refugees and immigrants from Islamic countries register their children for school and provides after-school lessons in Korean, music, and other subjects. The library sits just steps away from what will become The H in Hannam District 2, where many of its patrons live.
“If they moved to another residential area in Korea, for Koreans, it would be difficult,” Kim mentioned, highlighting widespread anti-Islamic sentiment in South Korea. “But here, it is internationalized already. It is easier to find accommodation, and the existence of the mosque and Islamic community helps when they are homesick.”
Many of Kim’s patrons and friends in the redevelopment area are struggling to find affordable housing. “Compared to other areas in Seoul, the rent in the Hannam redevelopment area was much, much cheaper, maybe by a third or half,” he said.
Many of the library’s patrons have moved to the Songdo area of Incheon, over an hour away from Seoul, where the rent is less expensive and there are jobs to be found shipping second-hand Hyundais and Kias to the Arab world. The owner of Cairo BBQ, an excellent Egyptian restaurant in the shadow of the mosque, is planning to open a food truck in Songdo. Baraka Little Library will also soon be joining the businesses looking for a new home, as evictions in District 2 are expected to begin next summer.
The deadline for all residents to voluntarily leave was May 15. Roughly 4 percent of residents remain in the neighborhood (down from 15 percent just a couple months ago), according to the District 3 homeowners union, which represents the property owners who stand to benefit from the project. The H is being built by Hyundai Engineering & Construction, South Korea’s second-largest construction company. Under contract with the property owners’ union. Yet neither Hyundai Engineering & Construction or the property owners are directly responsible for making sure the residents of Hannam disappear. This is the responsibility of Chammaru Construction, a demolition company heading a consortium in charge of removing residents from the area—in Korean, literally destroying them (evictees from redevelopment zones are known as cheolgeomin, or “demolished people”).
These companies hired by landowners to expel residents from redevelopment areas are often referred to by the euphemistic terms “migration management firms” or “demolition firms.” Colloquially, they’re called yongyeok ggangpae—contract gangsters, due to their practice of hiring workers on temporary contracts to carry out the dirty work of harassment and intimidation and avoid liability. In redevelopment zones around Seoul, it’s common to find inhabited buildings covered in hired thugs’ graffiti demanding that residents leave, with crude knives and skulls scrawled for emphasis.
Little information exists about Chammaru Construction, apart from chairman Jeong Hwan’s impressive amateur golf record and multiple South Korean journalists’ reporting about the company’s involvement in violent evictions. A Korean-language search for the company’s name autofills with jopok, a slang term for violent gangs. Chammaru Construction’s publicly-available project history shows that it takes credit for being the company responsible for the demolition of Wangsimni New Town 2nd District in Seoul, where a contracted thug was caught beating an evictee with a metal pipe in 2008. A Chammaru representative declined to answer my questions for this article.
Forced evictions have a long history in South Korea. Under the authoritarian leaders who ruled the country from the 1960s to the late 1980s, the police carried out evictions ahead of development projects. In the five years before the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, 720,000 people were evicted from their homes to build stadiums and Olympic Village housing. The Bangkok-based Asian Coalition for Housing Rights was founded in 1988 in response to evictions ahead of the Seoul Olympics that year; in an early bulletin, it remarked that the “scale of forced evictions in Seoul is likely to be the largest of any city in the world in recent decades; millions of people have been forced out of accommodation they own or rent, against their wishes… tenants have no rights at all, even if they make up half to three-quarters of all the residents in the area to be redeveloped.”
After South Korea’s democratization in 1987, the authorities changed their stance on construction projects—they were now civil affairs, meant to be handled between the different parties. Government involvement was maintained in the planning stages, but the state was no longer responsible for the evictions of existing residents once property owners agreed to demolish their neighborhood to build new apartments. Private companies, often with ties to organized crime, quickly stepped into the role of evictor-in-chief that the police abandoned.
“The state doesn’t want to be directly involved, because that’s highly politicized, especially after the post-democratic switch in 1987, because their legitimacy in post-1987 is the distance from the authoritarian path,” explained J. Nathaniel Porteux, a professor of political science at International Christian University in Japan who has studied the relationship between brokers of violence and the South Korean state. “Landowners want to have removal of these oftentimes illegal squatters and businesses. They [private demolition firms] can have some profits from it, and the state doesn’t have to be involved. So you have this kind of niche market emerge. And we see that still today.”
This system of forced evictions by violence-for-hire organizations has led to scenes as bizarre as they are cruel. On a cold Sunday in November 2003, a demolition company hired by the Seoul Metropolitan Government paid hundreds of homeless people 60,000 won (44 USD) to attack street vendors occupying their turf on the Cheonggyecheon, a then-covered stream in central Seoul. The city later explained to a local newspaper that due to the tight deadlines for the demolition operation, recruiting anyone they could find off the streets near Seoul Station was “inevitable.”
The remodeled Cheonggyecheon stream, lined with trees, is now one of Seoul’s signature tourist destinations, serving as a kind of monument to its planner, former Hyundai E&C executive Lee Myeong-bak. As Seoul mayor, Lee launched the Hannam New Town project before he was elected South Korean president in 2008.
After decades of law enforcement brushing off attacks against tenants by demolition firms, a turning point in public perception of South Korea’s construction system came in January 2009. Dozens of tenants of a commercial building slated for redevelopment in Yongsan, a few miles from Bogwang-dong, built a fortified encampment on the top floor. They were sick of violent intimidation by demolition firms hired by property owners and wanted greater compensation for the loss of their businesses. As is typical for Korean redevelopment projects, police did not make a single arrest while contract thugs harassed the tenants for months. As the tenants settled into their positions, attacks began. While the Seoul Metropolitan Police looked on, contract gangsters fired water cannons at the tenants, verbally harassed them, and started garbage fires in the building.
Hours after the tenants set up their encampment, police special forces raided the building. A fire broke out after flammable chemicals in the building spilled during the police-tenant struggle. Five tenants and one police officer died in the blaze. While all police officers were acquitted of charges, 20 of the protesters were jailed.
The brutality and police involvement in what is now known as the Yongsan Disaster shone a spotlight on tenants’ resistance movements and intensified criticism of demolition firms’ tactics. For a brief moment, a handful of lawmakers supported a bill restricting forced evictions and the tactics that demolition firms can use. The Anti-Forced Eviction Act would also have required a human rights impact assessment, similar to an environmental assessment, to be conducted before projects involving evictions can proceed. But attention waned, and the law was never passed.
“The state just has to make sure that the middle class stays on the sidelines,” said Porteux. “As long as the state isn’t seen as engaged in these illiberal actions, then for the most part, nothing happens… those that are impoverished, the elderly, they`re the ones that are (viewed or perceived) as the thorns in the side of the progress of the middle class.”
Today, the site of the deadly tenant-police battle in Yongsan is occupied by the 39-floor Hoban Summit A.Dition tower, whose apartments attracted over 10,000 interested buyers last year. Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, who held office during the Yongsan Disaster and returned to power in 2021, pushed through changes to the city’s development basic plan earlier this year to encourage more redevelopment of existing neighborhoods.
“Since there is no more vacant space in Seoul, to supply new housing, we need to tear down the old and quickly build more homes,” Oh declared in March. “That is the most important solution.” Construction continues on; whether redevelopment projects actually house more people is another question. The destruction of Bogwang-dong will do nothing to alleviate Seoul’s worsening housing shortage. Once The H is completed, there will be roughly 2,500 fewer homes in the neighborhood.
South Korea is often lauded as a safe society. Foreign YouTubers are pleased to be able to leave their laptops unattended in cafes; the murder rate is spectacularly low. But much of the country’s tranquil middle-class environments—apartment towers, malls, and privately-owned parks—were constructed through violence and intimidation. Construction in South Korea operates in a constant state of churn and modernization; the majority of all housing was built in the last 20 years. Beneath this endless renewal lies the mechanism of speculation.
When Leilani Farha, then-UN special rapporteur for housing, came to Seoul in 2018, much of her trip focused on forced evictions. It included a visit to a construction site in Ahyeon-dong, the home of Park Jun-kyung, a day laborer found floating dead in the Han River days after he was dragged out of his home by hired thugs. Million-dollar apartments replaced the one-story house that Park and his mother rented. Winter evictions are banned in Seoul after December 1, but Park was forced out on November 30, when the nightly low dropped to freezing.
Farha concluded that “development projects affecting housing in metropolitan areas are being implemented without consulting affected populations and are causing forced evictions and displacement,” and recommended that the government amend its “legal framework, policies and practices with respect to the reconstruction and redevelopment of urban areas” to comply with international human rights law. But the fundamental structure of South Korean urban development law has not changed in the six years since Farha’s visit.
The valuation of the tiny two-story building where I rented a room in Hannam District 3 in the mid-2010s has, however, nearly doubled between 2018 and 2022, selling for over a million dollars. The kind elderly woman who lived in the basement must now be gone, gone like the single man who always came home late at night, the same black baseball cap glued to his head. I paid $180 a month for my room; the pipes burst every winter, and we slid through hallways slick with ice. Our landlady never picked up the phone.
Seoul once seemed to me like a city where the poor could keep a roof over their heads, however meager. In the United States, affordable housing options like single-room-occupancy hotels have disappeared from most cities, driven out by moralistic regulations and spiraling property prices. In Seoul, it was possible to rent a basement apartment in a central neighborhood like Bogwang-dong for a few hundred dollars a month; prices for rooms were often written in charcoal on the side of a building alongside the landlord’s phone number. Hannam The H is ultimately the most visible manifestation of a continued mass transfer of the right to housing in central Seoul from the poor to the wealthy.
“In the 80s and 1990s when poor neighborhoods in South Korea were transforming into middle-class oriented high-rise condominiums, the vast majority of poor tenants were physically evicted and [these areas] were enabled to become middle-class neighborhoods,” said Shin. “That’s large-scale, megascale gentrification.”
The compact with South Korea’s middle classes that enabled them to attain property at the expense of the evicted poor is on the verge of shattering. It would take 86.4 years for the average working young person to afford an apartment in Seoul, a study from the Labor Institute of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions found earlier this year.
As investors wait for Bogwang-dong’s transformation, former residents are taking it upon themselves to chronicle the neighborhood’s history and present. Author Kim Yeojeong used to run a cafe in Bogwang-dong. “It had the cheapest rent in downtown Seoul,” she explained, echoing Bogwang-dong’s draw to the area’s small-scale entrepreneurs. Many of her cafe’s customers came from the neighborhood’s large LGBT population. “It was kind of a melting pot community, with less discrimination.”
In her books “Brightly Shining Village, Bogwang-dong” (2019) and “If We Don’t Forget Each Other” (2022), Kim recorded the stories of the neighborhood. Like so many Korean hillsides, she writes, Bogwang-dong once served as a mass cemetery, pockmarked with the round, earthen graves of the poor. The bones of many of the thousands of dead Seoulites buried in Bogwang-dong were never moved. In the 1980s, construction workers rebuilding houses in the neighborhood discovered skeletons below nearly every building site. They hastily pulled out offerings of food and alcohol to calm the disturbed dead and kept on building. In 2020, builders discovered dozens of graves while working on a massive estate for the Samsung family in nearby Hannam-dong.
Local landowners and Hyundai Engineering & Construction are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the bulldozers in Bogwang-dong; construction is expected to start in 2026. Over the next year, the neighborhood will exist in an uneasy liminal space, with the threat of forced evictions hanging over the last holdouts. The towers’ new residents will arrive in 2029. The old bones lying under Bogwang-dong will all be gone by then, dissolved into a gleaming vision of Seoul that betrays no hint of those trampled beneath it.