The Housing Stability urban subcommittee of the G3 Seoul Plan Planning Committee, which is drafting the housing policy blueprint for Seoul's ninth popularly elected administration, made its first site visit to the Central Housing Welfare Center. With housing insecurity growing among non-homeowning citizens due to imbalances in rental demand and the burden of housing costs, the visit aims to strengthen the implementation of housing welfare pledges through on-site inspections.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government said on the 9th that the G3 Seoul Plan Housing Stability urban subcommittee visited the Central Housing Welfare Center in Yongsan District on the 8th to directly review its operations and discuss concrete plans for the administration's housing welfare pledges.
At its first plenary meeting held on the 6th, the subcommittee set strategic goals of strengthening customized housing welfare by life stage and expanding the supply of affordable senior housing. This visit was conducted to flesh out a key task: enhancing the capacity of housing welfare centers.
The Central Housing Welfare Center in Yongsan District is a hub institution that provides overall support to the comprehensive housing security centers in Seoul's 25 autonomous districts. It also serves as a core base of the city's housing welfare policy, identifying housing-vulnerable people, including those living in non-housing accommodations, and providing customized housing counseling and emergency housing cost support.
At the site, committee members diagnosed practical difficulties, including blind spots affecting households living in gosiwon (low-cost dormitory-style housing) and semi-basement units, socially withdrawn young people, and administrative burdens in relocation and contract processes, and explored alternatives.
The Housing Stability urban subcommittee decided to pursue "qualitative capacity enhancement" that combines field-centered information delivery with follow-up management, going beyond simply expanding the number of counseling cases. Discussions covered tightly connecting the identification network among community service centers, SH (Seoul Housing & Communities Corporation), housing counseling offices, and youth support centers to proactively identify blind spots, building a one-stop support system linking counseling through follow-up management, and improving program sustainability by diversifying private funding sources.
In particular, for households in semi-basement units and gosiwon who miss out on benefits due to lack of information, the city plans to intensively operate "visiting housing counseling offices" more than 100 times a year and to newly develop settlement management tools that help residents settle stably after relocation and support their self-reliance.
The subcommittee especially emphasized linking the housing-vulnerable people identified by the welfare center with core housing supply policies to ensure their stable settlement. The plan is to build a system that reflects the demands of housing-marginalized groups identified in the field into public rental housing supply policies, including construction-based, purchase-based, and lease-based programs.
"The answer to achieving housing stability for citizens lies in the field," said Lee Chang-moo, chair of the Housing Stability urban subcommittee of the G3 Seoul Planning Committee. "We will gather opinions from the field, analyze legal amendments and budget structures, and clearly reflect housing stability measures that non-homeowning and vulnerable citizens can tangibly feel in the G3 Seoul Plan."
