Seoul Eyes Greenbelt Release and Military Sites in Coming Housing Supply Package

South Korea’s government is preparing a housing supply package that would lift development restrictions on parts of the greenbelt and repurpose military facilities for residential use, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol said, adding that the plan will be presented to the public soon. The remarks are the clearest indication yet of the two levers the administration intends to pull to expand supply: land currently locked up by conservation rules, and land currently occupied by the state itself.

Two Levers, One Constraint: Land

Greenbelt zones — formally, development-restricted areas ringing Korea’s major cities — exist precisely to stop the kind of construction the government now wants. Loosening them is one of the few ways to create sizable new residential land near Seoul, which is why successive administrations have reached for it only when supply pressure became politically untenable. Koo’s comment that the government is looking at releasing “some” of the belt suggests a targeted carve-out rather than a wholesale rezoning, though the scope will not be clear until the package itself is published.

The second lever is more novel. Military installations occupy substantial tracts inside and around the capital region, and relocating or consolidating them can free centrally located parcels that need no new infrastructure corridors. Converting such sites is administratively slower than a greenbelt release — it requires coordination with the defense establishment — but it sidesteps the environmental objections that greenbelt deregulation reliably provokes.

Defending the Tax Side of the Ledger

Koo paired the supply preview with a defense of the government’s demand-side stance. He characterized the strengthened tax burden on homes valued above 4 billion won as a normalization of taxation rather than a punitive new levy, framing the change as a correction to how ultra-high-priced properties had previously been assessed. The message is that the administration sees heavier taxes at the top of the market and expanded supply below it as complementary, not contradictory.

A Test for the Lee Government’s Housing Strategy

The package will be an early defining moment for housing policy under President Lee Jae Myung, who took office on June 4, 2025. Real estate has repeatedly determined the political fortunes of Korean administrations, and a plan that touches both the greenbelt and military land signals a willingness to spend political capital on the supply side rather than rely on tax measures alone.

Koo speaks with unusual institutional weight on this file. As head of the Ministry of Finance and Economy — the Sejong-based super-ministry that also oversees the tax and statistics agencies — he sits atop both the fiscal tools and the data that will shape the package. What remains unknown is the arithmetic: how much greenbelt land, which military sites, and how many housing units the government believes the two levers can deliver. Those numbers, and the timeline for ground actually being broken, are what the forthcoming announcement will be judged on.