Is a “City Where Poor People are Invisible” the Future of Development?

Meeting Yoon Young Kim, the Author of Seoul Walk by a Poor Urban Dweller

By Juyeon Park

Published: December 5, 2022

Translated by Seung-a Han

I remember when I first started living in Seoul. It was at a gosiwon [a small, cheap room for rent, originally intended for students preparing for exams away from their homes] in Sinchon. It was really a tiny, tiny room that got filled up with just a bed and a desk. It was a space that was difficult to describe just by saying it was cramped. My next housing was at a semi-basement near Hongdae. I was looking for a two-bedroom after getting sick of such a tiny space at the gosiwon, and a semi-basement was the only space that was realistically plausible [for me to rent]. The space was much bigger but the gloom of a semi-basement was distressing in a different way from a gosiwon’s cramped space.

My next place was on the ground floor but it was located on a hill. After that, when I finally got to live in a studio just a three-minute-walk from the subway station, I was evicted because the landlord was turning the building into a guest house for tourists. Even after that, living in Seoul meant journey after journey looking for housing. I often hear talk of things like redevelopment when I walk around my current neighborhood, too. Where would I live next? Could I stay there long-term? I stare at the construction site of a new high-rise apartment complex while having these thoughts. What was there before? Who lived there? What kinds of lives filled that space and then left?

Activist Yoon Young Kim with her book Seoul Walk by a Poor Urban Dweller in front of the Korean People’s Solidarity Against Poverty office. © Ilda

A book that could help me take a closer look at the nature of my imaginations has been released. It’s Seoul Walk by a Poor Urban Dweller (publisher: Humanitas) by activist Yoon Young Kim, who has worked for over a decade at the organization Korean People’s Solidarity Against Poverty. Just like its subtitle, ‘In Pursuit of the Evicted’s Lost Memories,’ this book contains the voices of the people who live in the city but do not get remembered. It is a record of not only the violence and damage experienced by those displaced by home demolitions to make way for redevelopment, by street vendors, by unhoused people, and by others, but also the history and achievements that they left in our society as well as their sincere voices. I finished the book in one sitting, unable to stop due to the vividness of its setting.

I met with Yoon Young Kim, who has been busy responding to climate disaster, housing inequality, the government’s budget cuts to public housing, and privatization of Korail’s Yongsan maintenance depot site, and discussed her book and urban redevelopment.

“Only when I realized I grew up in the street where Sanggye-dong residents were evicted  did memories pop up in my mind. Every neighborhood I had lived in, there were people who got kicked out. When I lived in Suwon, there was a temporary living area for evicted people behind the Catholic church. When I lived in Yongin, there were many greenhouses [which are used as illegal housing] in the street corner leading to the school; there were tall structures with speakers standing in the fields.” (133)

-In your book Seoul Walk by a Poor Urban Dweller there were stories of evicted people and street vendors but your personal stories as well.  I thought, ‘She remembers all of these scenes? Her memory is so good!’ (laughs).

My memory is not the best, but strangely I remember a lot from my childhood. These things came to mind when I started working for the organization Korean People’s Solidarity Against Poverty. While working, I was able to revisit my memories and also realize that there had been people getting evicted all the time around me. The memories just flashed before me. ‘That thing I saw as a child was a watchtower[1]. There were speakers attached to those towers and the songs from those speakers were protest music.’

A screenshot of the introduction video of the Yongsan Dark Tour. The Yongsan Maintenance Depot Committee is protesting against the large-scale speculative development of the public land behind Yongsan Station and demanding that [the government] leave the space for public housing. The Yongsan Dark Tour offered by the committee is a civic program to remember the Yongsan Tragedy and imagine an alternative future for the Yongsan maintenance depot’s development.

-Your book includes incidents that took place in the process of urban development everywhere from Gyeongui Line Trail to Yongsan, Ahyeon, Dongnimmun Gate, Sanggye-dong, Seoul Station, Jongno, and Jamsil. Do you remember the first scene that you witnessed after joining this movement?

I’m not sure when was the first time, but I remember the Yongsan Tragedy (an incident on January 1st, 2009 at the Namildang Building at 2 Hangang-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, where five evictees and one police officer were killed by a fire that arose in the process of the SWAT team trying to subjugate the evictees who were occupying the building’s rooftop watchtower). I did think about the oppressed—oppressed laborers, street vendors, the poor—before then as well, but I hadn’t meticulously thought about what the true nature of that oppression was about. But witnessing the Yongsan Tragedy made me think, ‘How does something like this happen?’ I started thinking that the moment you break away from the ‘normality’ that this society had established, [you realize,] ‘A human being can be treated like a non-citizen to this extreme extent. They become the subject of state violence.’ It was a huge shock.

It’s still the same. One of the complaints shared by many evictees is ‘the way other people treat me completely changed.’ [What they mean is that] ‘While I’m still the same, the moment I start telling them that I’m trying to retrieve my rights that have been stolen from me, I become a target of violence without hesitation [by them.]’ That’s the moment where [the evictees’] faith that society will protect them falls apart. That has always been the case. Even in old interviews with evictees, it’s the same story: ‘The moment I became an evictee, everything got stolen from me and I could no longer trust my country’. I think that’s the saddest part of my work: seeing evictees or street vendors becoming so disheartened as they feel those emotions.

“One day out of nowhere, starting with just that single word ‘development’ or ‘management disposal plan’, [they] stir up the whole neighborhood and destroy lives. They make people flee in the middle of the night, commit suicide, sit on the ground [in protest] and fight. You know, you consider many different things even when you’re just buying a spoon for your home. […] They just sweep away [your home] without a word. Then they tell us we’re being unreasonable.” (28)

-It seems like the societal prejudice and stigma against evictees and street vendors are still prevalent. That could also be due to the fact that the horrendous violence that takes place in the process of redevelopment isn’t very visible. What do you think is the biggest problem in the process of urban redevelopment?

Korea’s development method is a unique one that is in the form of a joint redevelopment. A private enterprise makes a union and brings in the developer. When a private enterprise forms a union, [the government] basically gives them the right of eminent domain (a policy that grants the developer of the public services the right to forcefully acquire ownership of land without the landowner’s consent). [The policy] is saying that [the private enterprise forming a union] is for the public good. So if three-fourths of landowners consent, [the developer] gets the right to take all of the land. Is that really for the public good?

In the past when development was happening from scratch, maybe granting eminent domain could be counted as for the public good. I’m sure residents were displaced even then. I think today’s housing inequality situation arose from the fact that the tenants became the very last, subordinate stakeholder in the process [of development.]

Moreover, with different, often conflicting interests [among stakeholders], there is discrimination against the evictees, street vendors, etc. I think the reason that this conflict is so serious in our society is because the interests of these different groups are so entirely divided. The landlords can look forward to the profit they would gain from redevelopment and so can the people who are participating in the construction process, such as the contractors. On the other hand, the tenants lose their home. Even if they [the landlords and the tenants] are neighbors, their interests cannot help but be divided. The prejudice against evictees is not the fruit of misunderstandings or imagination, but the effect of these conflicts of interests repeating again and again in the history of re/development.

“Social distancing in tiny subdivided apartment with a shared bathroom?!?? Guarantee safe housing for the homeless and those who live in institutions!” A banner from the  March 2020 press conference on the urgent demands of people with disabilities and people living in poverty at the height of the COVID-10 pandemic. There are stories of discrimination and exclusion that the unhoused population living in the Seoul Station area experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic in Seoul Walk by a Poor Urban Dweller as well. (Photo source: Korean People’s Solidarity Against Poverty’s Facebook page)

“The case of the owner of the Chinese restaurant Gonghwachun, Dae Won Kim, was even more heartbreaking. The forced eviction he faced in Yongsan was his second one. He had been running his business in Insadong before coming to Yongsan, and when it was redeveloped, he wasn’t able to recoup his premium [gwolligeum, a fee paid under the table from a new tenant to the old tenant]. He invested about 120 million won when moving his restaurant to Yongsan, but the compensation [for his eviction] was just 65 million won including his security deposit. The development policies that were structured around the landlords’ profits didn’t provide any safety net to the tenants…” (65-66).

-In Korean society, it seems like it’s a given that you live with anxiety when you’re a tenant, whether in a residential space or a commercial space.

In 2018, the UN’s housing rights reporter visited Korea. (Reference: [Commentary] UN Housing Rights Reporter Expresses Serious Concerns on the Reality of Korea’s Housing Rights [Korean-language article]) According to the reporter, Leilani Farha, ‘Korean citizens seem to not even perceive housing as one of the basic human rights.’ I wonder if one of the reasons that people’s views on the evictees protesting is so cold is because, maybe, most people have of course never had that right. They may think, ‘Why do they resist so much when those lands are not even theirs?’ It’s incomprehensible to them. But if you get evicted that way, you will be kicked out forever. So someone is fighting against that.

As a matter of fact, many evictees say that they ‘were not sure why (evictees) would fight so much’ until they themselves started protesting. They used to think, ‘Why are they [other evictees] like that? If we’re told to leave, we should leave.’ Among all the evictees I met, no one fought expecting to get a big profit out of it. Of course, there may be some people who started protesting with that idea in mind. But the longer the fight gets, it seems like there are two different mindsets that exist among the remaining evictees. One is that there is nothing they can do if they just move somewhere else due to an eviction. For instance, the owner of the Chinese restaurant in Yongsan, Dae Won Kim, was in a situation of losing everything he owned by getting evicted first in Insadong and then in Yongsan. So were the [owners of] Seochon Goongjoong Jokbal, Hongdae Dooriban, and Garosu-gil Woojang Chang Chang.

Another is thinking, ‘This is really so wrong.’ Many protesters decide to fight because they think this whole system is an incomprehensible one to more than just their individual selves. They think, ‘How could this happen? The premium I saved up… the investment I made in the store… The landlord said this wouldn’t be a problem…’ And they look around and realize that they’re not the only ones. In fact, to look at things more objectively, it might be more profitable to just leave as soon as you can. Some evictees also think, ‘That is better, I guess.’ But they just get so angry. How can a human treat another human like this, and use such violence? How is this allowed and legal? I get taken aback every single time. How such a violent thing is legal.

“Now I’m scared of people. Previously, when I thought of ‘neighbors,’ there was a sense of warmth. But now I’m scared. Who knows whether these warm people treating me nicely now will turn into those people (the landlords who incited and enacted violence)? I haven’t been able to trust humans since then. I really hate that. I became so desolate as a human being.” (44)

“Let’s Take Back Eulji OB Bear! Let’s Protect Nogari Alley!” Activist Yoon Young Kim making a speech at the ‘Forced Eviction OUT! Field Cultural Festival’ (Source: Korean People’s Solidarity Against Poverty Facebook)

-A few months ago, I went to the Field Cultural Festival for the Eulji OB Bear Protest (Eulji OB Bear was the pioneering bar of Nogari [Dried Pollack] Alley located in Euljiro-3-ga, Jung-gu, Seoul. It was the first bar to be selected as a Hundred-Year-Old Shop by the government. Last April, it was sacrificed to gentrification and got demolished. The owners had been experiencing conflict with their landlord over the lease contract since 2018; but in January, when Manseon Hops [a bar chain] purchased a part of the building, the landlord filed a transfer lawsuit against Eulji OB Bear demanding that they vacate the space. Manseon Hops continues to expand its business and they basically dominate Nogari Alley currently). We were making all this noise, asking people to listen to us, but all these people were sitting at Manseon Hops tables, drinking so indifferently. That was horrifying. I thought that witnessing this every day would be so torturous.

The evictees tell me that their friends, their acquaintances, even their families ask, ‘Why do you have to do that?’ and that they are not sure how to explain. It’s because they themselves cannot understand why it came this far. They are trying to explain this already very complicated thing, so when people around them seem to not understand them—apart from the physical violence they experience from the landlords—they experience this sense of isolation that makes them feel like they’re alone in this world. That is what’s scarier than visible, physical violence.

-What I enjoyed about reading Seoul Walk by a Poor Urban Dweller was learning that these struggles did not end in failure but had clear accomplishments. I was grateful that there were changes due to their efforts.

 

Yes, it is true that the evictees’ fight for housing rights brought clear accomplishments: introduction of rental apartments [imdae apateu, apartments in new towers available for rent to people with qualifications such as a low income], fixing the percentage of the required number of rental apartments for redevelopment projects, etc… All of these things are proof of success by the evictees. Because of these changes that they brought, there has been a decrease of evictee protests in residential areas. However, for commercial spaces, because the protection of tenants was nonexistent, it was inevitable for an incident like the Yongsan Tragedy to happen. The tenants in these commercial spaces are continuing to fight. Of course there are some policies that have changed. The blind spots still exist, but still, coming this far is the result of a tremendous amount of effort.

I think it would be good for the current evictees fighting against forced evictions to know this history. A lot of people experiencing forced evictions think their experiences are unique, not knowing that there have been other people who experienced something like that. So it leads them to emotional isolation. They think, ‘How can this happen? I’m probably the only one going through something like this.’ But that is not true. I think they will be able to fight with more self-respect if they understand that the fight is not an individual one between myself and that person [such as the landlord], but is due to the way the system is set up, which makes these fights unavoidable.

I have concerns about the future as well. What should I do in a society that lacks the history of accepting housing as a basic human right? But now, there is a movement of tenant organizing such as the Minsnail Union.  This is really important, and I think there is hope in these movements.

Activist Yoon Young Kim holding her book Seoul Walk by a Poor Urban Dweller and a banner at a sit-in protesting cuts to the public rental housing system in front of the National Assembly. (Source: Humanitas Facebook)

-Housing rights are such an obvious basic human right yet there is this perception of ‘purchasing an apartment’, ‘attaining an apartment.’

Currently we are protesting against the budget cuts to public rental housing. We’re calling it ‘Bring Out the Public Rental Housing.’ It seems like some people are skeptical even about this. They say that if public rental housing increases, people who bought their homes with hard-won money would feel wronged… public rental housing is unfair… It was mind-boggling that people think public rental housing is a[n unfair] privilege of a selected few. In that logic, you could say, ‘It is a privilege because only those people are receiving it’ about almost every form of social welfare.

Public housing sales [gongong bunyang, in which the federal government, local governments, or the Korea Land and Housing Corporation sells newly-built housing to qualifying people at low prices]  also benefit only a few people, but [the government] rules that that is a lot more for the public good. Some people even call these ‘lottery sales.’ So this is for the public good and public rental housing is not? In fact, there is nothing so ‘privileged’ about public housing. In order to live in public housing, you need to get past sky-high competition and the wait is extremely long. Moreover, public housing doesn’t just exist anywhere you’d want it to be. I think the reason that this issue doesn’t come to light [as much] despite such high demand is because it is politically underrepresented, no matter how many people are living in poverty. The tenants are also underrepresented.

“(After the fire at Kukil Gosiwon, t)he firefighters began the site briefing: ‘Gosiwon are not for students preparing for exams as they used to be,’ ‘They have become housing for poor people,’ “So most of the victims are men in their 50s.” After such briefing was over, a politician asked, ‘So are the students safe? [thus revealing the lack of concern for poor people]’” (178)

-When we discuss housing rights, we cannot avoid the question of what we are going to do with the inadequate types of housing. We’ll probably have to slowly get rid of semi-basements, gosiwon, jjokbangchon [neighborhoods with buildings that have extremely small rooms inside for housing, often with communal toilets and poor maintenance], etc. We need a discussion on where the urban poor [living in these inadequate types of housing] would go, and what kind of efforts are needed for the city to co-live with the poor.

Not long ago I did a lecture at a university. Afterwards, a student asked, “But why do poor people need to live in the city? Can’t they just go to the suburbs?” So I answered, “They’ve been living in the city, and the process of the city changing is kicking them out. The history of redevelopment is one of dividing people according to their economic power. Is that really good urban planning? I don’t think so.”

Even when I was saying that I felt so mad. When I started thinking why I was so mad… [it was because] you cannot say something like that when you think about the labor of the people living in places like jjokbangchon or gosiwon. It is so disgraceful. People living in the shantytown Guryong Village are cleaning the office buildings in Gangnam. They are providing childcare. They are providing domestic labor. These people are part of those who make this city run. So how can you believe that their place needs to disappear? I think that [way of thinking] is so bizarre.

Mike Davis, the author who wrote Planet of Slums once said the reason that slums appear is not because the city is poor, but because it is wealthy. I think the history of housing inequality in Korea doesn’t reveal a second face of development, but the very nature of development. In order to resolve it, we need to question the development itself. We need to be skeptical of how we came to this [way of] developing; whether the method of developing has been wrong. I don’t think we should stop at just thinking, ‘Of course there were regrettable aspects on the other side of development’ while celebrating Korea’s speedy economic growth. We need to clearly talk about who had to pay the price.

 

Obviously I don’t think there’s a single method that will change everything all at once. I also don’t think the world will change after the stories of these evictees spread and people feel more heartbroken about this than before. But if some kinds of awakenings and decisions turn into action, and that action leads to making some sort of institutional arrangements that will bring actual change, then change will come! Moreover, responsible responses from those who decide the policies are also necessary. I’ve never seen that.

-I feel a bit bitter thinking about how many politicians there are with multiple homes. On the one hand, in this society where we are all shouting for real estate I’m not sure if we can eliminate that desire… I’m wondering how to look at urban development.

I don’t think there’s anyone that is completely innocent in this system. But I think we should continue to ask how we should live. If we don’t ask and don’t think, it is so easy to be deceived. When you go to Seoul Station, [the city] puts plastic sheets over the flower beds to prevent the flowers from freezing. How beautiful this mindset is. But [that same entity] treats people sleeping in the streets like trash. Sometimes I feel dizzy thinking about this gap between these two mindsets: the thrifty one that covers the flower beds with plastic and the one that displaces poor people to where you cannot see them.

It is manipulation of reality when you try to make poor people invisible when it is not true that they do not exist. I hope that we think about the city before it was manipulated that way: who used to live there, who used to work there. If a street vending stall disappears one day, that may mean that someone’s livelihood has also vanished. I hope we can look at our city with those kinds of specific thoughts.

-I hope many people can read this book that led me to think about the reality of development, evicted people who lose everything they had, the nation that is so violent and irresponsible, housing rights, and more… Do you have a specific type of person that you really recommend this book to?

I hope that people who are living in this city, especially those who are feeling so exhausted and are questioning why it has to be so exhausting, will read the book. I hope that they will be able to gain a sense of solidarity with those who have been evicted, and be able to see this city we’re living in from a different perspective.

Moreover, while I hope that those who are currently fighting can read it, [I know that] they do not have the bandwidth or energy to even read… I always feel sad that they are fighting in such isolation. I hope that they can get rid of some of the loneliness that they feel, and that they will feel more pride in their fight while reading this book.

*Original article: https://ildaro.com/9501

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[1] Potential evictees use watchtowers to keep watch (particularly in the night or at dawn) for demolition workers coming to the area. If demolition workers are spotted, the person or people in the watchtower uses the speakers to let neighborhood residents know so that they can come and try to stop the work.