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South Korea
This Week in AsiaPolitics

After flood deaths, will South Korea President Yoon Suk-yeol follow through on vow to ban ‘Parasite-style’ basement flats?

  • Seoul will immediately stop issuing permits for construction of such homes, known as ‘banjihas’, and aims to phase them out over 20 years
  • President Yoon Suk-yeol, Seoul authorities face mounting public pressure after a family of three drowned in their submerged underground flat

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A man walks past an unscrewed security grill for a basement flat known as ‘banjiha’ where three tenants, including a disabled woman and a teenager, died after they were trapped by floodwaters in their basement home in Seoul on August 11. Photo: AFP
Park Chan-kyong
South Korean capital Seoul’s infamous semisubterranean homes – similar to the dwellings depicted in the Oscar-winning film Parasite – have come sharply in focus following this week’s record downpour in the country.

On social media, numerous anecdotes and videos have been circulating on how the country’s most vulnerable people who live in these homes, called ‘banjiha’, were trapped in their homes as floodwaters rose.

Workers clear a waterlogged, mud-covered ‘banjiha’ in the Gwanak district of Seoul on August 11, after flooding caused by record-breaking rains. Photo: AFP
Workers clear a waterlogged, mud-covered ‘banjiha’ in the Gwanak district of Seoul on August 11, after flooding caused by record-breaking rains. Photo: AFP

A widely circulating video showed three men struggle to break open a window with a fire extinguisher and a spanner to save a man trapped in one of these homes.

Lee Seung-hoon, 28, tried to escape through the single door of his underground flat but strong water pressure from the flood kept the door tightly shut.

His neighbours in the Sillim-dong subdistrict had no choice but to take matters into their own hands and rescue him.

Seoul’s emergency rescue services were stretched thin this week by what President Yoon Suk-yeol called Seoul’s heaviest rainfall in over a century.
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