'Hotel beggar'

By Park Moo-jong

"Do you know the word, 'hoggar'?" I asked many foreign friends of mine, who asked in return, "Beg your pardon?"

When I first encountered the word in the newspaper last week, I looked the term up and found it on Wikipedia: "a rocky desert in the north center of the Sahara, composed of black volcanic necks and of flows rising above a pink granite massif."

But here in Korea, "hoggar" is a newly-coined Konglish term, a compound of "hotel" and "beggar," which is a heartbreaking product of the Moon Jae-in government's series of miserable housing policies.

Now, the foreign friends understood: homeless citizens living in hotels, not deluxe ones for tourists, but something more like motels and inns with cheap walls, though it "literally" is meant to mean a "beggar living in a hotel."

The new word also reminded me of Willie Nelson's 1963 country song, "Home Motel": "What used to be my home has changed to just a place to stay, a crumbling last resort when day is through."

In short, the new word spreading rapidly here in cyberspace symbolizes the certain failure of the government's numerous makeshift policies to help solve the ever-worsening housing shortage, notably the soaring house rental fees focused on "jeonse" prices.

Jeonse is a type of real estate lease unique to Korea: Instead of paying monthly rent, a renter pays a lump-sum deposit to the landlord and retrieves it when the contract ends.

As jeonse prices are ever increasing and housing units for jeonse are sharply vanishing since last year, the helter-skelter government is pouring out a package of measures almost every day to increase the supply of "public" rental houses, to no avail.

After all, the Moon administration and the ruling Democratic Party of Korea came up with an absurd idea to remodel hotels and empty commercial buildings, to turn them into studio apartments. In the process, those in charge of real estate policies are adding fuel to the fire with various sophistries.

For instance, Rep. Jin Sun-mee of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, chairwoman of the National Assembly's Committee of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, only rubbed salt into the wounds of rental house seekers, after visiting a five-story public rental house, dubbed "villa" in Korea, saying, "This house does not differ from my home. People should dismiss their illusions about apartments." Despite such assertions, she herself lives in a new high-rise apartment in Seoul.

Many people must have been reminded of the notorious remarks Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), the last queen of France, reportedly made upon learning the peasants had no bread: "Let them eat cake" (Qu'ils mangent de la brioche).

How about the top official responsible for housing policies? Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Kim Hyun-mee has a very incorrect view of the situation, citing low interest rates and the increasing number of one-person households for the difficulty in finding jeonse housing.

The highlight of the government officials' remarks came from President Moon jae-in, "I am confident in (solving) real estate problems." Minister Kim is second to none. She claimed that the quality of public rental houses is rising in step with public expectations. It is no wonder that Moon appears to have no plan to dismiss the outspoken minister.

All the "omnishambles" were definitely caused by the absurd revision of three leasing laws by the government and the ruling party. They rewrote the laws under the pretext of protecting tenants from landlords. But what they aimed at was raking in related taxes. They are reaping what they have sown.

To be brief, the revised laws make it compulsory for landlords to extend a two-year lease once, if their tenants on jeonse want to live there for two more years, unless the landlord intends to live in the property instead.

The jeonse market had been comparatively stable under the principle of market economy before the government and the ruling party revised the laws and poured out all kinds of regulations and measures.

It is questionable if the incumbent government and its party are really able to and thus qualified to handle the housing policies for their every measure ends up aggravating the situation.

The difficulty for young people in finding places to live naturally results in the decrease of marriage and birth rates. It is incredible for the government not to respect this simple theory and the market mechanism with unlimited regulations and punitive taxes.

The term, hogger, indeed ridicules the government's "ambitious" plan to turn some hotels into residences. If so, the officials handling housing problems should serve breakfast and offer room service to the new tenants. What a shameful mockery!

What's going on in the real estate market proves that the revision of the three lease laws only causes ill effects. Then, they should rewrite them and leave the matter to the market economy.

Park Moo-jong (emjei29@gmail.com) is a standing adviser of The Korea Times. He served as the president-publisher of the nation's first English daily newspaper from 2004 to 2014 after working as a reporter since 1974.