"The most ordinary yet desperate dream of owning a home is being trampled under the Oct. 15 measures," Oh said in a Facebook post. "The government must no longer turn a blind eye to the side effects of its real estate policy."
The conservative mayor argued that tightened mortgage caps and expanded regulated zones have erected "abnormally high barriers" to property purchases, freezing transactions and funneling frustrated buyers into an already parched rental market.
His rebuke comes as official data showed housing transactions surging ahead of the curbs.
Apartment sales in Seoul jumped 62.5 percent month-on-month in October and soared 176 percent from a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport — a rush analysts attribute to buyers scrambling to close deals before stricter rules took effect.
The broader Seoul metropolitan area recorded 39,644 housing deals during the same month, up 26.7 percent from September and 58.5 percent higher than a year ago. By contrast, transactions outside the capital region declined 6.2 percent month-on-month, underscoring the outsized impact of the regulations on the country's economic heartland.
The Oct. 15 package designated all 25 districts of Seoul and 12 surrounding Gyeonggi Province municipalities as regulated zones, triggering the most aggressive clampdown on the capital region's property market in years.
Oh disclosed he recently met with the Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport to convey his concerns but found little willingness to address the policy's fallout. He accused the central government of seeking municipal cooperation on housing supply while refusing to revisit market-distorting regulations.
The mayor called for an immediate easing of restrictions on urban redevelopment projects and a reversal of lending policies that, in his view, treat genuine homebuyers as speculators.
Invoking the previous Democratic Party's Moon Jae-in administration's income-led growth experiment, Oh warned that "policies begun with good intentions become misgovernment when their results prove harmful," and called on authorities to pivot before repeating past mistakes.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.
