Housing Europe welcomes delegation from Korea
International exchange increasingly valuable
Brussels, 24 August 2018 | Published in Urban, Research
On July 19th, three researchers from the Land and Housing Institute of Korea –Miyeon Kang, Kee Hoyoung and Cheong So-Yi - paid a visit to the offices of Housing Europe for a meeting with our Research Coordinator, Alice Pittini and Project and Innovation Manager, Sebastien Garnier.
The Institute is the research branch of LH - the Korea Land and Housing Corporation, the main body responsible for designing and implementing public housing and residential welfare as well as land and urban development/regeneration. It manages about 1 million social rental housing units throughout the country.
The objective of the visit was to learn about the types of social housing providers that exist in Europe with a particular focus on the non-profit sector, and to exchange on the private rental sector, its size, actors involved and regulation. The discussion was extremely interesting and also an opportunity to learn about housing policy in Korea.
About 6% of the total housing stock in the country is public rental housing, and Korea wants to increase the availability of social housing by mobilizing also the private sector to that goal, especially in Seoul. Furthermore, private rental housing is limited in Korea, but current conditions as for instance in terms of interest rates could favour an expansion of this sector. As the government would like to support this development, it's particularly timely and important to implement regulation to ensure quality and affordability in the sector.
Given the interest of LH to learn about housing regulation and practices from other countries and its experience with international knowledge exchange programmes, the visit was also an opportunity to invite the Korean colleagues to next year’s International Social Housign Festival in Lyon. We hope this exchange has just been the beginning of a fruitful future cooperation.
* This visit came just a few months after a similar one by the Japanese delegation from the Housing Bureau at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT).