By Kim Tae-jong
Staff Reporter
The stabbing rampage by a man at a ``gosiwon'' in southern Seoul Monday showed that these low-cost lodging facilities for the poor make people vulnerable to fire and crime.
``Gosiwon,'' a facility packed with tiny single-room accommodations, was originally used for students preparing for civil servant examinations. Gosiwon literally means 'a place to study for state exams'. However, they are now becoming lodging places for all types of people, from migrant laborers to laid-off salary workers, seeking somewhere to stay with cheap rent and no frills.
On Monday, a 31-year-old man went on an arson and stabbing rampage at a gosiwon in Gangnam, killing six people and leaving seven others wounded.
Park Young-jin, 32, a resident in a gosiwon in Mapo-gu, northern Seoul, is a jobseeker from Gyeonggi Province. He chose to temporarily live there to save money.
``It's definitely not a place to live long. It's cheap but I realized again how dangerous it is to live in a place like this following the latest stabbing rampage,'' Park said. ``I will look for another lodging place right after I get a job.''
According to the Seoul Metropolitan Fire and Disaster Management Department, six out of every 10 residents of gosiwon around Seoul are people like Park, who simply choose to live there as a cheap way of accommodation.
The emergency control authorities recently conducted a survey on 108,428 residents at 3,451 gosiwon in Seoul. Of them, 24 percent were office workers; 20 percent unemployed and 13 percent daily-contract laborers. The rest were mostly students or those preparing for state exams.
Gosiwon usually have 30 to 60 small rooms and a typical room in such gosiwon is around 3.3 square meters in size, equipped only with a small bed and desk, asking for 100,000 to 300,000 won in monthly rent without deposits.
The poor living conditions of gosiwon sometimes leads to fire and other tragic accidents. There have been nine cases of arson or fires at gosiwon killing 25 and injuring tens more since 2003. Fire safety, emergency exits and other facilities are areas of concern.
Many ethnic Koreans from China and foreign laborers are taking shelter at gosiwon while working as day laborers.
Residents usually do not know or care about who is living next door. ``We wouldn't even know if someone was dead in the next room. It's like a common rule that we don't bother anybody here,'' a college student at a gosiwon in Sinchon, northern Seoul said.
With increasing accidents at gosiwon use to people preparing for national exams. But owners of gosiwon claim it is not easy to tell who is preparing for national exams and who is not.
``Ever since the economy started to get worse, we have had more people come to live here,'' an owner of a gosiwon in Sinchon said. ``We have various types of people, like students, foreigners and jobseekers. We're trying to screen people by age, profession or appearance. But it's practically impossible to accommodate people on a selective basis.''
As Gosiwon are not categorized as an accommodation facility, they do not have to receive prior approval from authorities, leading to the establishment of a growing number of loosely-regulated and substandard gosiwon near subway stations and universities. The business type of gosiwon is vaguely defined as a ``facility for the use of many people.''
``For the safety of residents at gosiwon, we need to change regulations so as to require prior approval for running gosiwon,'' a Seoul disaster agency official said.
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