Seoul-area housing starts must roughly triple by December to reach the minister's own forecast

Eight months of starts, as counted by the Seoul Economic Daily, averaged about 10,840 homes a month in the Seoul metropolitan area ^[15]. Carried through December at that pace, the year closes near 130,100 starts, or 48.5% of the 268,000 target ^[16]. Land minister Hong Ji-sun's range of 80% to 88% of the goal ^[7] works out to 214,400 to 235,840 starts ^[17]. Reaching it leaves 127,661 to 149,101 homes to break ground on between September and December, or about 31,900 to 37,300 a month ^[18]. The required pace is 2.9 to 3.4 times the January-to-August average ^[19]. The full target would take 181,261 starts in four months ^[22].

One way to reconcile the two figures is that the ministry can see public projects due to break ground late in the year that an eight-month total cannot capture. If so, monthly starts from September would run above about 32,000 ^[18]. The plainer case is that the pace holds and the year ends near 130,000 ^[16]. Between the two sits a year in which some public projects start while private developers stay held back by costs and financing ^[8]. We think the year lands closer to the run rate than to Hong's range. Against the same months of last year, the gain is about 1,300 homes on a base of roughly 85,500 ^[20]. The pace has barely moved. The counter-thesis is the ministry's own visibility into its scheduled projects, and monthly starts above 32,000 in the final four months would show we were wrong.

Spread evenly over the five years through 2030, last September's pledge comes to 270,000 starts a year ^[21], close to this year's 268,000 target ^[4]. Any shortfall this year has to be made up in the years left if the 2030 figure is to hold. The government's other pledges are counts of homes. On Jan. 29 it said it would supply about 60,000 homes on public land including the Gwacheon racecourse and the Taereung country club ^[2]. In September it added a plan for 1.19 million public homes by 2030 ^[5]. The analysts the paper cites describe the obstacles to private ground-breaking in money terms, naming construction costs and financing burdens, and want redevelopment permitting and project timelines shortened ^[8].

The claim that demand-side rules are failing on prices belongs to those analysts, who argue that rules centered on curbing demand cannot by themselves ease price instability caused by short supply ^[10]. The article does not include price data, so the starts figures are the only measured part of that argument. The government has amended the permit system's owner-occupancy requirement three times this year ^[11]. Choi Byung-chun, an adjunct professor at Myongji University, wrote on social media that "what matters is whether this is desirable for low- and middle-income households" ^[24]. He added that "the longer the permit system is extended, the more jeonse and monthly rents will jump, and the heavier the housing cost burden on these households will become" ^[25].