Housing is a city problem. Building homes alone does not solve the problem of where people live. A pleasant living environment must come with the home. And even that is not enough. Only when people can travel easily between that home and their workplace do they settle there. What the public wants is adequate housing.
Adequate housing has four requirements. First, a commute that works day to day. Within a city's living zone, the commute should take 10 to 20 minutes by public transit; to a neighboring city, no more than 40 minutes each way. Second, a pleasant living environment. The amenities of daily life should be within walking or cycling distance. Third, affordability. Ordinary middle-income and low- and middle-income households should be able to cover housing costs out of their own earnings. Fourth, housing stability. No one should be forced into a move they do not want.
Cities with high levels of housing stability have two things at once. One is ample supply. Recent data put housing units per 1,000 people at 574 in Helsinki, 527 in Zurich, 519 in Copenhagen and 477 in Vienna. The other is housing that does not become an investment vehicle. In Vienna, municipal and cooperative housing together account for more than 40% of the housing stock, and 60% of residents live in such homes. In Copenhagen, public rentals and price-regulated cooperative housing also exceed 40%. In Zurich, non-profit housing centered mainly on cooperatives stands at about 27%, and the city's basic ordinance sets a target of more than one-third of the housing stock. Because such homes are not investment assets, they anchor the housing market. They guarantee long-term residence at a set rent, and once they accumulate beyond a certain scale, they become the yardstick against which private rents are measured. When anyone who does not own a home has universal access to them, housing stability rises sharply.
Tokyo's 23 wards show another path. On 2024 figures, Seoul has 9.34 million people on 605 square kilometers; Tokyo's 23 wards have 9.78 million on 628 square kilometers — nearly the same size and population. Yet Seoul has 3.91 million housing units against 5.92 million in Tokyo's 23 wards. Per 1,000 people, that is 418 units in Seoul and 605 in Tokyo's 23 wards. Our long-term public rental stock does not reach 10%. Tokyo's 23 wards have a low share of public rentals but a deep supply, and the Act on Land and Building Leases protects tenants strongly. A landlord cannot refuse to renew a contract without just cause, and the courts weigh each side's need for the property, how it is actually being used, and even relocation compensation. Where ample supply meets strong tenant protection, housing stability becomes more likely even with a low share of public rentals.
Seoul is short of housing relative to its population, and short of public rentals as well. It now has almost no space left to add housing. Making it easy to commute into Seoul from the wider capital region is close to the only solution. Convenient commuting can maintain the economically active population while dispersing the resident population across the capital region. In existing urban centers, redevelopment and rebuilding of aging complexes should improve living conditions while adding new housing, but project timing must be staggered and relocation plans prepared so that displaced demand does not surge all at once. Urban redevelopment alone is not enough, so new urban space must be secured in the capital region. When new urban space is created, it should be filled in densely — housing and transit, education and talent development, industry and jobs, culture and the arts, consumption and everyday services, health care and caregiving — to build cities that offer both quality of life and capacity for innovation. Whether to repair existing cities or build new ones should be decided by which approach does more to widen the public's range of choices and ease the scarcity of urban space.
Over the long term, balanced national development will contribute greatly to solving the capital region's housing problem. If several innovative, livable cities emerge outside the capital region and draw in talent and jobs, concentration in the capital region will ease and the housing problem will ease with it. Supplying housing is more than supplying homes. It is laying the foundation for people to stay, for talent to settle and for cities to grow. In the end, housing is a city problem, and easing the scarcity of the urban space people prefer is the fundamental solution to it.
