South Korea's capital region has grown into one of the world's major metropolitan areas. As people and jobs concentrated there, drawing in companies, universities, hospitals and cultural facilities, the region has driven national economic growth. Yet that same concentration has produced a paradox: housing costs have risen, commutes have lengthened and the space available for daily life has grown scarce.
Data from Statistics Korea show that the capital region accounted for 51.1% of the country's population and 53.7% of its jobs last year. Housing, by contrast, stood at just 46.8% of the national total. Over the past decade, the region's shares of population and housing each rose 1.4 percentage points, while Seoul's share of the population declined. Jobs remain concentrated in Seoul even as residential functions spread to the outskirts. This cannot be explained simply as a housing shortage. Comparing the capital region's urban space with that of other major global cities makes the nature of the problem clearer.
Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on urbanized land — the area actually developed under city planning — show the capital region has 29 square meters per person, well below Tokyo's 50, Paris's 61 and New York's 80. That means a large number of people live packed into a limited urban space. High density is not in itself a problem. When people gather, the exchange of knowledge and information becomes more active, and corporate productivity and a city's capacity for innovation can rise. What matters is whether there is enough urban space and livable environment to support that density.
The same gap appears in domestic comparisons. Looking at land zoned for urban use — residential, commercial and industrial — the capital region had 59.8 square meters per person last year, far short of 174.3 square meters outside the region. The share of people commuting 60 minutes or more was 18.1% in the capital region as of 2020, more than four times the 4.4% elsewhere. Living space is relatively cramped, and more time goes to getting around. Housing costs weigh heavily as well. In the 2024 housing survey, Seoul's price-to-income ratio (PIR) was 16.3, up from 13.5 in 2020. Average living space per person across the capital region was 33 square meters, below 40.2 square meters in the rest of the country. People live in tighter quarters while paying more for housing.
These findings show that the capital region's property problem cannot be approached through the volume of housing supply alone. What people want is not simply a roof over their heads. It is an entire living environment — easy access to good jobs, and convenient access to education, health care, culture and leisure. In the end, the region's problem lies in the scarcity of the kind of urban space people prefer.
What is the solution? Refurbishing aging space in existing cities and expanding insufficient infrastructure are both necessary. But in cities already built to high density, redevelopment alone can secure only so much space. A strategy for supplying new urban space must be pursued alongside it. The goal should not be new towns that supply housing and nothing more, but innovative cities that combine jobs and housing, transport and education, health care and culture. New cities must become places people would actively choose, and these cities must be linked through wide-area transport networks and industrial and knowledge networks so that the choice of great urban space extends across the whole country.
Property problems are, in the end, urban problems. Managing the market through finance and taxation matters, but unless the scarcity of good urban space is eased, the problem is bound to repeat itself. Let us shift the perspective from policies that simply increase the number of homes to policies that increase good urban space. The way out of the paradox of concentration in the capital region lies in redesigning the nation's space so that more people can choose better cities.