Development of a program of financial support on enhancing apartment houses maintenance in Korea—Focused on the U.S. and Japanese financial programs for housing maintenance in Korea

Abstract Although Korea has as large a housing stock as other developed countries hold, it has striven to focus on growth-oriented policies by creating new housing units rather than maintaining or rehabilitating existing ones, which has resulted in a few efforts to develop policies to maintain and rehabilitate existing apartment houses. In early 1990, there was a huge construction of 2 million units of apartment housing in the areas around Seoul, such as Bundang and Ilsan. At this point of time when it has been nearly 20 years since the enormous construction, loan programs that enable the existing multiple dwellings to be maintained for sustainable usage are expected to receive much attention. In this study, the loan programs of New York City and Tokyo Metropolis to maintain multiple dwellings were analyzed as a model for Korean loan programs to support the maintenance of apartment houses, and based on the results of analysis, the directions of organizing the domestic loan programs to maintenance apartment houses were presented. The results are summarized as follows: First, along with the housing finance policies executed previously in New York and Tokyo, the Korean environment to maintenance apartment houses and policies for maintenance were examined. Then, the necessity for and imperfection of the policies of Korea to support the maintenance of apartment houses were identified. Second, the targets, benefits, qualification for application and conditions for benefits of the loan programs of New York and Tokyo for maintaining multiple dwellings were researched in order to find the basic framework of the loan programs. Last, based on the framework of the loan programs of New York and Tokyo, the directions of loan programs and measures to foster housing funds for maintaining apartment houses for Korea were proposed.