Despite government emphasis on home purchase and four decades of extensive house building, levels of owner-occupation in South Korea remain relatively modest. This paper examines Korean homeownership policy development, identifying key reasons for the limited growth: the underdevelopment of housing finance; unproductive government intervention on property speculation; ineffective tax support for lowincome home purchase; and the structure of the rental sector. Korean housing policy is characteristically supply driven, which has expanded housing stock but distorted distribution, increased speculation and polarised housing wealth. This paper considers the underdevelopment of demand-side policies as the underlying failure in the sustainable and equitable expansion of homeownership. It also implicates housing more centrally in East Asian policy regime divergence.

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This paper examines the achievements and limitations of housing assistance programs for low-income households. Korean public rental housing has been rapidly developing since 2000, and thereby achieved an increase in public rental housing stock, housing quality improvements, and the reduction of rent over-burden for low-income tenants. Despite some conflicting evidence, it appears that the provision of newly-built public rental housing has helped stabilize the prices of neighboring private rental housing units. But, as we are entering an era of one million long-term public rental housing units, we need to shift our focus from quantity-oriented provision to housing maintenance for tenants, and from cost-based rental housing to affordable rental housing and better access to rental housing for low-income tenants who are not beneficiaries of government assistance. Most of all, it is very important for local governments and the private sector to actively participate in the provision of public rental housing in order to ensure a stable rental housing market.LHI Journal (2013) 4(4):303-316 http://dx.

The aim of this study is to discuss ways to improve Korea's housing survey by comparatively analyzing the housing surveys being carried out in six other countries. The subject countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Australia, and Japan-the countries that conducts large-scale surveys for more than 20,000 households on a national level and where data collection is easily available. The comparative analysis items include survey history, purpose, subject, project owner, survey item, data collection method, and the use of survey outcome. The comparative analysis results showed that each of the six countries are conducting national housing condition surveys on a regular basis considering each nation's characteristics of housing stock and policy goals, and the survey results are being used as the basis for setting policy guidelines including the selection of policy targets and the determination of appropriate rent standards, and the basis for housing assistance budget planning. Korea's housing survey has been conducted three times up until now since 2006. There should be efforts to systemize and standardize the survey components, establish standards for monitoring the changing trend of national housing stock, standards for determining policy targets, and measures to open data and provide feedback considering the preceding studies of overseas countries in order to better utilize the housing survey data for policy development.

This paper aims to explore the characteristics of Bogeumjari Housing Program and its significance to housing policy, and propose an appropriate direction of future housing policy for low-income households without home ownership based on actual data on housing careers and preferences of the policy target households. Supply of Bogeumjary Housing is characterized by consolidation of existing housing program, housing support by income level, differentiation of eligible households, and housing subscription on-line. Bogeumjari Housing Program is meaningful in that it is a policy that resumed the supply of permanent housing, provides multi-tier support system by income level, and adjusts the imbalances in housing demand and supply. Despite their strong preferences for Bogeumjari Housing, their affordability is very low due to their low income levels and gloomy outlook for household finances. In this light, the government should pursue housing policies that include not only new housing constructions, but also efficient use of housing stocks, expansion of loans for first-time home buyers, and introduction of home mortgage and housing voucher.