Breach of trust in land speculation

By Nam Sang-so

It was 1964. A secretive organization was quietly buying land in central Florida nearby Lake Buena Vista southwest of Orlando ― a lot of land for a cheap price. Much of it was cow pastures or swamps. Land like this was nothing special and only cost about $180 an acre (4,047 square meters), according to whohq.com. The land owners were pleased to sell the useless land and the residents of the neighborhood were happy to see that some big business was coming to Florida, which would create a lot of jobs. Rumors escalated. In October of 1965, a local newspaper solved the mystery by reporting it was Disney. Walt Disney and his brother Roy had decided to build in Florida the Walt Disney World Resort, a bigger version of the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California.

Back in November of 1963, Walt had chosen central Florida for the new theme park. The area had sunny weather throughout the year and it was near the crossing of Interstate 4 and Florida's Turnpike, while there was a regional airport about a half hour away.

However, if anyone had known what Walt was up to, land prices would have soared. As a result, Walt and Roy had other people do the purchasing job in the field. They made up a company, Tomahawk Properties, code named the land purchase “Project X” and quietly began buying land. It worked well as the project members were armed with a high sense of morality and no one breached trust in performing their secret job. After the news got out that Disney was the buyer, land prices in the area shot up to $1,000 an acre. In all, the company had bought about 27,440 acres. That's almost twice the size of Manhattan in New York City. Now, there is a large bronze statue of Walt holding hands with Mickey Mouse in the center of Disney World. On the statue's base is a quote from Walt that reads, “We believe in our idea: a family park where parents and children could have fun ― together.” Disney World knew that the faithful performance of the Project X team under a situation of conflicting interests allowed the Florida resort to open successfully in 1971.

Now let's look at how the state-run Korea Land and Housing Corp., known as LH, has been handling the designation of new cities around Seoul and other cities. Employees of LH and some other high-ranking government officials who had advance access to confidential city-planning information scrambled to get rich in breach of trust and avariciously speculated in pieces of the designated areas, much of them farmland, ahead of the government's action. The allegations of breach of trust are rocking the nation at a time when public discontent over skyrocketing home prices is running high. Most people in Korea are eagerly waiting to see how the government will deal with the depraved morals of the corrupt civil servants.

The writer (sangsonam@gmail.com) is a retired architect/engineer.