Seoul’s government announced plans on Wednesday to ban basement apartments in the South Korean national capital — a style of subterranean home depicted in the Oscar-winning film Parasite — after four people drowned to death in such apartments in recent days during record floods, the BBC reported.
“Seoul will no longer give out permits to construct such homes from this week on and will gradually convert existing apartments,” the British broadcaster reported on August 10 citing municipal officials.
The worst flood recorded in Seoul in 115 years has devastated the capital in recent days, causing at least 12 deaths as of August 11. Four of those deaths took place on August 8 across two separate basement apartments after the structures became inundated with water.
“[T]hree family members — a woman in her 40s, her sister and the sibling’s teenage daughter — […] were found dead after being trapped in a submerged semi-basement home in Sillim-dong, not far from the affluent Gangnam area. Another woman in her 50s who lived in a similar residence also drowned, according to the DongAIlbo newspaper,” Bloomberg relayed.
The ill-fated family of three in Sillim-dong had “sought help as their home filled with water, but rescuers were unable to reach them,” the BBC revealed on August 10.
Seoul’s government will soon begin implementing measures designed to phase out the use of basement apartments within the city’s downtown area. The capital currently counts 200,000 basement or semi-basement apartments, a figure amounting to five percent of all residential buildings in Seoul.
Representatives of the Seoul metropolitan government detailed their plan to prohibit the use of basement apartments for residential purposes on August 10.
The Hankyoreh, a left-wing South Korean newspaper, relayed the information, writing:
The plan is to give the landlord a grace period of 10 to 20 years and remove the building in sequence. To this end, it was decided to devise a plan to induce a change in use so that the current tenant does not use it for residential purposes any longer and to give incentives to the landlord.
It also introduced a plan to prevent the deterioration of the living environment by giving tenants who have left the basement or semi-underground rooms the opportunity to move into public rental housing or providing housing vouchers.
Seoul’s basement apartments are typically “rented out to people on low incomes,” the BBC observed on Wednesday. The fictional family depicted in the South Korean film Parasite — which was the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2019 — likewise lived in a basement apartment due to financial hardship.
“Subterranean and semi-underground housing is a backward type of housing that threatens the housing vulnerable in all aspects, including safety and living environment. It must disappear now,” Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon told reporters on August 10 as quoted by the Hankyoreh.