Seoul Digs In Against Government Push to Build Housing on Yongsan Park Land

The central government and Seoul’s city government are now openly at odds over the housing supply package unveiled on August 13, and the sharpest dispute concerns land that was never fully on the table before: Yongsan Park and the capital’s greenbelt. Seoul Metropolitan Government says it was not consulted on key sites in the plan and restated its opposition to converting greenbelt land into apartments, while Yongsan District went further, declaring strong opposition to any housing on the park site. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, far from retreating, says it is studying whether the entire park could be used for housing — setting up a direct confrontation when Minister Kim Yun-duck meets Mayor Oh Se-hoon on August 20.

A Supply Plan the Host City Says It Never Agreed To

The August 13 package leans heavily on central Seoul. It includes roughly 10,000 housing units at the Yongsan International Business District with construction slated to begin in 2028 — a timeline the city government disputes, saying the housing component was never settled in talks with the ministry. Seoul officials also voiced regret over what they called insufficient prior consultation on the package as a whole, an unusual public rebuke between two administrations that must jointly execute almost any large-scale supply program in the capital.

The friction matters because Seoul controls much of the machinery the plan depends on: zoning decisions, redevelopment approvals and the management of urban parks. A supply target announced in Sejong can stall quickly if city hall declines to process the paperwork.

Why the Park Is Such Charged Ground

Yongsan Park is being assembled on land returned from the U.S. military’s former Yongsan Garrison, the longtime headquarters of American forces in Korea, on a site that had served Japanese military purposes from 1906 until liberation in 1945. Successive governments have promoted the site’s transformation into a public park as the symbolic return of the city’s center to its residents after more than a century of military use.

That history explains the intensity of the reaction. When First Vice Minister Kim Yi-tak said the government would discuss using the Yongsan Children’s Garden — a section of the park already open to visitors — as a housing site, the city objected. When the minister then said the government was weighing housing across the whole park, Yongsan District issued its own statement of strong opposition, aligning the district office with city hall against the ministry.

The government’s logic is straightforward land economics: Seoul packs about 9.31 million registered residents into roughly 605 square kilometers, and large developable parcels near the city center essentially do not exist — except where the military once sat. The counterargument, from the city and district, is that the park was promised as permanent public space and that sacrificing it would trade a one-off housing gain for an irreversible loss.

Greenbelt Objections Resurface

The park is not the only flashpoint. Seoul restated its long-standing refusal to release greenbelt land for housing, a position it has held through several rounds of national supply planning. Greenbelt conversion has historically been the central government’s fallback when in-city sites run short, which is precisely why the city’s preemptive refusal narrows the plan’s room for maneuver.

Oh Se-hoon Redirects the Debate Toward Taxes

Mayor Oh added a second front. While welcoming the partial adoption of the city’s requests on easing redevelopment regulations, he argued the supply measures cannot deliver their intended effect unless the government reworks its 2026 tax reform proposal, announced by the finance ministry this summer. His case is that supply expansion and the current tax settings pull in opposite directions — without adjusting the tax burden on housing transactions and ownership, new supply targets will not translate into market stabilization.

The August 20 meeting between the minister and the mayor is now the venue where all of these threads converge: the park, the greenbelt, the Yongsan business district timeline and the tax code. Whether the two sides emerge with a joint roadmap or hardened positions will determine how much of the August 13 package survives contact with the city that has to build it.