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>There are even small plots of land for urban farming, many of which were given to Songdo's former fishermen as reparation for the destruction of their fisherie

>There are even small plots of land for urban farming, many of which were given to Songdo's former fishermen as reparation for the destruction of their fisheries. I really wish this was less of a puff-piece for the "City of the Future" Songdo (TM) and looked more into how land was acquired, who owns the rights to land and property, who pays for things, how much does it cost to live there now, etc. It has a skeptical tone but it fails to address any of the real questions people might have about living there or its history. If it's so empty, why hasn't it been filled up by people looking for low-cost housing? (If the supply is high, <fill in armchair economics here>) There are few cities with this level of infrastructure planning springing up in the west as far as I know. Lots of people are pointing to empty cities in NK, China, and the UAE but lack of coverage there can be explained by their hostility to free journalism. Are SK voices just as restricted?

bane 12y ago
Something Korea's national government appears to be in the process of doing is trying to break apart the centralization on Seoul and spread economic activity more evenly around the country. For example: South Korea is in the process of establishing a new planned capital like Washington D.C. or Canberra. The move has been compared to the U.S. capital moving from New York City and Philadelphia to D.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City There's all kinds of secondary reasons for this. Seoul has an astonishingly high population density for a developed country and controls such a vast percentage of the economy that municipal decisions basically act as national policy. Satellite cities all basically follow whatever Seoul is doing and other than Pusan, there's strikingly little major cultural of social development. The rest of Korea is basically farms, minor industrial centers and museums/monuments. Other smaller issues are things like the problems with depopulation of the rural areas: for example, farmers regularly import wives from nearby countries, leading to a spate of new laws regulating this practice. So development efforts like Songdo and Sejong are basically intended to spread the population centers around a bit, attract foreign investment and continue the momentum South Korea currently enjoys in becoming a regional and global player. With Songdo in particular, the attraction is specific, it's the virtual geographic center of the North East Asian regional economy: Shenzhen, Taipei and Tokyo are all around 3 hour flights to Songdo. This makes business meetings in or from Songdo a (long but doable) single day affair, while doing the same in Seoul adds enough hours* that it turns them into 2 day events. A trip from Incheon International to central Seoul is easily a 2 hour one-way trip in traffic. Doing the math, 6 hours in the air, 4-5 hours driving, 4 hours in security and waiting to take off (2 hours each way) and you're looking at a very long day. So why not just do this in Incheon? Incheon is like Seoul, a densely packed, established city mostly existing as a port city for handling imports and exports of goods. It's not the greatest place to do business deals in a nice setting. It's hard to clear out enough space to make work and btw, the road to Incheon passes through Songdo. This arrangement basically makes Songdo the nice showroom for Korea for doing business while the ugly warehouse in back is reserved for the chaos of execution. Cost to live in Songdo isn't bad. In fact, most of Korea outside of Seoul is fairly reasonable. http://www.realestatesongdo.com/ http://www.realestatesongdo.com/ For example, A 145m^2 (about 1500 sq ft) 3 bedroom apartment is running about 550million Won or about half a million U.S. Dollars. A similar sized apartment rents there for ~$2400/mo. By comparison, a similar sized apartment in Namdaemun (an area in Seoul) runs around $1.2million. Why aren't people moving there? Probably because it's inconvenient. People get really invested in the places they live, and the Seoul metropolitan area is huge. There's nicer places to live for a similar cost in the Seoul Capital Area that are better established and offer more benefits for the average non-international jet-setter. More importantly, Songdo is part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone, which offers various tax incentives to qualifying residents and businesses, incentives which the average person wouldn't be able to take advantage of. The article focuses too much on Koreans living there. Songdo is really intended as a place for foreigners doing business in South Korea to comfortably live and for South Koreans engaged in International Business to interface with them, a kind of Korean Dubai. For example, highlights are a Golf Course (expensive as sin for Koreans), an International School district and an Opera House. More reading here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incheon_Free_Economic_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incheon_Free_Economic_Zone this one in particular is basically a brochure outlining most of what I've provided above and providing a few other interesting points, particularly about the benefits of the Free Economic Zone that Songdo is within. http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan018745.pdf http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- omegaworks 12y ago
  Yes, but who owns it? Who is investing the capital in the infrastructure? Who got to tell those fisherman "yeah, so you're never going to be able to fish here again, here is some farmland." Is the government building everything? Where does the rent money go?
  - bane 12y ago
    According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Business_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Business_... Gale International holds 61%, Posco 30% with Morgan Stanley Real Estate holding the final 9%. Infrastructure, labor and funding are being provided by the city of Incheon. I don't know who owned the original area. But I imagine as these things go, regardless of who owned the tidal flat property Songdo is being built on (and my guess is that the answer was "nobody" since it would be under water most of the day), the government would end up owning it as an intermediary using South Korea's relatively strong eminent domain laws. There's a long history in South Korea of displacing people out of traditional areas in the name of development. Projects like Sejong City and the new Pyeongtaek development (where the U.S. military is relocating to) are all large eminent domain land grabs in fairly rural areas. The tradeoff is usually a guaranteed apartment or some subsidy on a new apartment in one of the new developments. It's tough to do development on a large scale in a very small country with even more limited usable land. Land reform in South Korea is one of the oldest government issues dating back thousands of years.
- yongjik 12y ago
  I think some clarification is necessary: If South Korean government were really serious about addressing the problem of over-centralization of Korea (hint: the present administration isn't), they wouldn't have built yet another new city reachable by Seoul's subway system. In contrast, the construction of Sejong city (pioneered by the late president Roh Moo-Hyun) was fraught with legal/political objections from conservatives, who were worried that such a move would undermine their traditional position of power (and potentially do something to finally stabilize the housing market of Seoul, though that's rather far-fetched). The struggle culminated in our own Constitutional Court declaring the original Sejong project (which wanted to make it the new capital of governance) as unconstitutional, on the grounds that it would be against Gyeongguk Daejeon, the "constitution" (or close equivalent) of our dead Joseon dynasty (1392-1910). (Yep, these guys were desparate, and had the backing of half South Koreans, so "being logical" wasn't a high priority. So went the chance of building a balanced nation...) Needless to say, none of these guys raised any objection in building Songdo: unlike Sejong, Songdo poses no danger to any established political power, and it might even serve as a convenient way to funnel tons of money into construction companies.
yongjik 12y ago
> If it's so empty, why hasn't it been filled up by people looking for low-cost housing? I'm no expert in the exact situation of Songdo, but I think I can answer this. It's because no one wants it to be low-cost housing, least of all Songdo's residents (there must be some). Housing price is akin to religion in South Korea. Those who finally buy a house, frequently do so only after working for a decade and making heavy loans, and they may literally become homeless if housing prices drop. They will do everything to keep the price afloat. So, even if a construction company finds half of the apartment units empty, it cannot readily offer reduced prices to potential buyers, without angering everyone already there. You don't want to face a thousand angry Koreans. (If only they were half as angry at the daily procession of political corruption... sigh.)
kyllo 12y ago
I really wish this was less of a puff-piece for the "City of the Future" Songdo (TM) Speaking of that, nearly every city in Korea has an official marketing slogan in English: http://waegukin.com/english-slogans-korean-cities-the-complete-list.html http://waegukin.com/english-slogans-korean-cities-the-comple...

bane 12y ago

Something Korea's national government appears to be in the process of doing is trying to break apart the centralization on Seoul and spread economic activity more evenly around the country. For example: South Korea is in the process of establishing a new planned capital like Washington D.C. or Canberra. The move has been compared to the U.S. capital moving from New York City and Philadelphia to D.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City There's all kinds of secondary reasons for this. Seoul has an astonishingly high population density for a developed country and controls such a vast percentage of the economy that municipal decisions basically act as national policy. Satellite cities all basically follow whatever Seoul is doing and other than Pusan, there's strikingly little major cultural of social development. The rest of Korea is basically farms, minor industrial centers and museums/monuments. Other smaller issues are things like the problems with depopulation of the rural areas: for example, farmers regularly import wives from nearby countries, leading to a spate of new laws regulating this practice. So development efforts like Songdo and Sejong are basically intended to spread the population centers around a bit, attract foreign investment and continue the momentum South Korea currently enjoys in becoming a regional and global player. With Songdo in particular, the attraction is specific, it's the virtual geographic center of the North East Asian regional economy: Shenzhen, Taipei and Tokyo are all around 3 hour flights to Songdo. This makes business meetings in or from Songdo a (long but doable) single day affair, while doing the same in Seoul adds enough hours* that it turns them into 2 day events. A trip from Incheon International to central Seoul is easily a 2 hour one-way trip in traffic. Doing the math, 6 hours in the air, 4-5 hours driving, 4 hours in security and waiting to take off (2 hours each way) and you're looking at a very long day. So why not just do this in Incheon? Incheon is like Seoul, a densely packed, established city mostly existing as a port city for handling imports and exports of goods. It's not the greatest place to do business deals in a nice setting. It's hard to clear out enough space to make work and btw, the road to Incheon passes through Songdo. This arrangement basically makes Songdo the nice showroom for Korea for doing business while the ugly warehouse in back is reserved for the chaos of execution. Cost to live in Songdo isn't bad. In fact, most of Korea outside of Seoul is fairly reasonable. http://www.realestatesongdo.com/ http://www.realestatesongdo.com/ For example, A 145m^2 (about 1500 sq ft) 3 bedroom apartment is running about 550million Won or about half a million U.S. Dollars. A similar sized apartment rents there for ~$2400/mo. By comparison, a similar sized apartment in Namdaemun (an area in Seoul) runs around $1.2million. Why aren't people moving there? Probably because it's inconvenient. People get really invested in the places they live, and the Seoul metropolitan area is huge. There's nicer places to live for a similar cost in the Seoul Capital Area that are better established and offer more benefits for the average non-international jet-setter. More importantly, Songdo is part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone, which offers various tax incentives to qualifying residents and businesses, incentives which the average person wouldn't be able to take advantage of. The article focuses too much on Koreans living there. Songdo is really intended as a place for foreigners doing business in South Korea to comfortably live and for South Koreans engaged in International Business to interface with them, a kind of Korean Dubai. For example, highlights are a Golf Course (expensive as sin for Koreans), an International School district and an Opera House. More reading here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incheon_Free_Economic_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incheon_Free_Economic_Zone this one in particular is basically a brochure outlining most of what I've provided above and providing a few other interesting points, particularly about the benefits of the Free Economic Zone that Songdo is within. http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan018745.pdf http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
omegaworks 12y ago
Yes, but who owns it? Who is investing the capital in the infrastructure? Who got to tell those fisherman "yeah, so you're never going to be able to fish here again, here is some farmland." Is the government building everything? Where does the rent money go?
- bane 12y ago
  According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Business_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Business_... Gale International holds 61%, Posco 30% with Morgan Stanley Real Estate holding the final 9%. Infrastructure, labor and funding are being provided by the city of Incheon. I don't know who owned the original area. But I imagine as these things go, regardless of who owned the tidal flat property Songdo is being built on (and my guess is that the answer was "nobody" since it would be under water most of the day), the government would end up owning it as an intermediary using South Korea's relatively strong eminent domain laws. There's a long history in South Korea of displacing people out of traditional areas in the name of development. Projects like Sejong City and the new Pyeongtaek development (where the U.S. military is relocating to) are all large eminent domain land grabs in fairly rural areas. The tradeoff is usually a guaranteed apartment or some subsidy on a new apartment in one of the new developments. It's tough to do development on a large scale in a very small country with even more limited usable land. Land reform in South Korea is one of the oldest government issues dating back thousands of years.
yongjik 12y ago
I think some clarification is necessary: If South Korean government were really serious about addressing the problem of over-centralization of Korea (hint: the present administration isn't), they wouldn't have built yet another new city reachable by Seoul's subway system. In contrast, the construction of Sejong city (pioneered by the late president Roh Moo-Hyun) was fraught with legal/political objections from conservatives, who were worried that such a move would undermine their traditional position of power (and potentially do something to finally stabilize the housing market of Seoul, though that's rather far-fetched). The struggle culminated in our own Constitutional Court declaring the original Sejong project (which wanted to make it the new capital of governance) as unconstitutional, on the grounds that it would be against Gyeongguk Daejeon, the "constitution" (or close equivalent) of our dead Joseon dynasty (1392-1910). (Yep, these guys were desparate, and had the backing of half South Koreans, so "being logical" wasn't a high priority. So went the chance of building a balanced nation...) Needless to say, none of these guys raised any objection in building Songdo: unlike Sejong, Songdo poses no danger to any established political power, and it might even serve as a convenient way to funnel tons of money into construction companies.

yongjik 12y ago

> If it's so empty, why hasn't it been filled up by people looking for low-cost housing? I'm no expert in the exact situation of Songdo, but I think I can answer this. It's because no one wants it to be low-cost housing, least of all Songdo's residents (there must be some). Housing price is akin to religion in South Korea. Those who finally buy a house, frequently do so only after working for a decade and making heavy loans, and they may literally become homeless if housing prices drop. They will do everything to keep the price afloat. So, even if a construction company finds half of the apartment units empty, it cannot readily offer reduced prices to potential buyers, without angering everyone already there. You don't want to face a thousand angry Koreans. (If only they were half as angry at the daily procession of political corruption... sigh.)

kyllo 12y ago

I really wish this was less of a puff-piece for the "City of the Future" Songdo (TM) Speaking of that, nearly every city in Korea has an official marketing slogan in English: http://waegukin.com/english-slogans-korean-cities-the-complete-list.html http://waegukin.com/english-slogans-korean-cities-the-comple...