Seoul Housing Push Turns to Yongsan Park Land as Ministry Courts City Hall

South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport is preparing to negotiate with the Seoul Metropolitan Government over one of the capital’s most sensitive pieces of real estate: the Children’s Garden inside Yongsan Park. First Vice Minister Kim E-tak said the government would consult the city on whether the site could be tapped for new housing, while Minister Kim Yoon-deok separately described relations with Mayor Oh Se-hoon’s administration as cooperative, saying the ministry is “actively reviewing” the mayor’s requests and that consultations are proceeding smoothly. Together, the remarks sketch the government’s emerging playbook for easing Seoul’s housing crunch — unlock centrally located public land, and keep City Hall on side while doing it.

Why a Park Is on the Table

Seoul packs roughly 9.31 million residents into about 605 square kilometers — around 0.6 percent of the national territory divided into 25 districts — which is why every large parcel inside the city carries outsized weight in supply debates. Few parcels are larger or more symbolically loaded than the former Yongsan Garrison grounds. The land served as a Japanese military installation from 1906 until Korea’s liberation in 1945, then became the headquarters of US forces in Korea after the Korean War. Its conversion to civilian use has been a decades-long project: a December 1988 presidential decree set the process in motion, and the adjacent Yongsan Family Park — built on what was once the garrison’s golf course — opened to the public in November 1992.

The Children’s Garden occupies part of the returned base land that had been earmarked for the larger Yongsan Park project. Redirecting any of it toward apartments would mark a notable shift in how the government weighs green space against housing stock in the city center, and the vice minister’s careful framing — consultation first, decision later — reflects how contested that trade-off is likely to be.

An Unusually Warm Line Between Sejong and City Hall

Housing policy in Korea frequently becomes a tug-of-war between the central government, based at the administrative complex in Sejong, and the Seoul mayor’s office — particularly when the two are led by rival parties. That makes Minister Kim’s tone noteworthy. Kim Yoon-deok, who took office on 19 July 2025 as the fifth land minister under President Lee Jae-myung, went out of his way to signal accommodation, saying the ministry is giving serious consideration to what Mayor Oh has asked for and characterizing the working-level dialogue as frictionless.

The choreography matters because almost any large-scale supply plan inside Seoul — rezoning, density bonuses, public-land conversions like Yongsan — requires the city’s cooperation on permitting and infrastructure. A public commitment to joint review, rather than unilateral designation, suggests the ministry has absorbed the lessons of past supply drives that stalled amid central-local friction.

Softening the Landing for Single-Home Owners

The minister also addressed the backlash from owners of a single home who do not live in it, a group facing pressure to convert to owner-occupancy under the government’s recent tax overhaul. His answer was gradualism: the residency-related measures will be phased in rather than imposed at once, and the government will lean on expanding supply to absorb the dislocation. The message is aimed at reassuring households worried about being forced into rushed sales or relocations while the market adjusts.

The Balance the Government Is Trying to Strike

The through line across the day’s remarks is sequencing. The ministry wants credit for moving aggressively on supply — up to and including converting park land in Yongsan — while avoiding the two failure modes that have sunk previous plans: open conflict with Seoul City Hall and abrupt demand-side shocks to ordinary owners. Whether the Children’s Garden proposal survives public scrutiny will be an early test of whether that balance can hold, and the promised consultations with the city will show how far the cooperative rhetoric extends once specific sites, densities, and timelines are on the table.