South Korea’s Unequal Flood Disaster

Welcome to today’s Morning Brief, where we’re looking at South Korea’s record floods, Argentina’s interest rate hike, and what the FBI was searching for at Mar-a-Lago.

If you would like to receive Morning Brief in your inbox every weekday, please sign up here.

The floods that engulfed South Korea this week have provided the first major emergency for new President Yoon Suk-yeol—and one where the enemy isn’t missiles coming down from the sky, but torrential rain.

At least 11 people—including one child—have died in the floods, which came after the worst rainfall the capital, Seoul, has seen in more than a century.

South Korea is the latest to experience a particularly intense monsoon season in Asia. Earlier this summer, record floods in Bangladesh severely affected more than 7.2 million people, while in China, thousands were evacuated amid flash flooding in the southwest and northwest of the country.

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon warned that the city would need to improve its ability to handle such intense rainfall now that climate change makes the weather events more frequent. On Wednesday, Oh announced plans to spend more than $1 billion building infrastructure to increase the city’s resilience, including a vast underground tunnel system first proposed after heavy rains in 2011.

That four of those killed in the flooding lived in banjiha semi-basement dwellings—the kind popularized in the Oscar-winning movie Parasite, which featured a catastrophic flood scene—has thrown a spotlight on the country’s housing crisis, where home ownership is becoming out of reach for the middle classes, let alone those further down the economic scale. Roughly 5 percent of households in Seoul are believed to live in banjiha properties across the city.

The housing market was a major issue in March’s presidential election, and outgoing President Moon Jae-in was repeatedly criticized for his government’s failure to tame it. The winner of that election, Yoon, has pledged to reverse Moon’s housing policies. During his campaign, Yoon promised to build 2.5 million new homes, with half of them to be built with private sector funds.

Despite a raft of policy interventions, prices in metropolitan Seoul, where almost half the country’s population lives, remain stubbornly high, and the price of an average apartment there has doubled in the past five years. Rising interest rates have recently helped cool the market, but the knock-on effect of higher mortgage rates has increased fears of defaults among those who have managed to take a step onto the property ladder.

In response to this week’s floods, Oh on Thursday announced the phasing out of banjiha basements over the next two decades. Where the approximately 200,000 families who count on them for shelter will go is a problem yet to be solved. Civic groups immediately called for more affordable housing to address the new need.

Sohn Mal-nyeon, a banjiha resident in her 70s, told the Korea Herald that the new announcement was unlikely to lead to real change: “Well, what do you expect people to do? They live here because it’s cheaper, you know.”