Look across a Korean city and you may wonder: why are there so many apartments? The answer has less to do with a simple lack of land than with how modern Korea was built.
Seoul's urban landscape, where apartment complexes make up a large part of the cityscape. Personal photo.
Look across the edge of almost any major Korean city and one thing is difficult to miss: apartment buildings.
They appear in long rows on the outskirts of cities, fill entire neighborhoods, rise between older low-rise districts, and sometimes seem to reach right up to the mountains.
So, why are there so many apartments in Korea?
The simple answer is not that Koreans have always preferred apartment living.
Korea did not start out as an apartment country. Today's apartment landscape is the result of rapid urbanization, severe housing shortages, large-scale housing development, and a gradual change in what Koreans came to expect from a modern home.
In other words, Korea's apartment skyline is not just a story about housing.
It is a record of how modern Korea was built.
Is Korea Really an Apartment Country?
The numbers explain why the impression is so strong.
According to Korea's 2025 Population and Housing Census (register-based), released in July 2026, apartments accounted for 65.8% of all housing units in Korea, or about 13.29 million of roughly 20.18 million units.
But there is an important distinction.
The same census found that 54.5% of general households lived in apartments. These are two different measures: the first describes the country's housing stock, while the second describes where households actually live.
So it would be inaccurate to say that two-thirds of Koreans live in apartments.
But the larger point is clear.
Apartments have become the dominant type of housing in Korea's built environment.
Local perspective: When Koreans talk about apartments, they are not necessarily talking about every person's home. But as a physical part of the Korean city, apartment complexes are difficult to miss.
That is why a visitor looking across Seoul, Busan, Daejeon, or many other Korean cities may feel as if almost everyone lives in a high-rise apartment.
Yet this landscape is surprisingly recent.
Korea Did Not Always Look Like This
In the middle of the 20th century, apartments were far from the normal Korean home.
In 1970, apartments accounted for just 0.77% of Seoul's housing stock, while detached houses accounted for 95.3%. Seoul's housing landscape was still overwhelmingly made up of low-rise homes.
Then the city began changing at extraordinary speed.
As industrialization accelerated, people moved to Seoul in search of jobs. The city's population grew rapidly, and housing shortages became increasingly serious.
The solution was not simply to build more houses one at a time.
Korea began experimenting with a very different model: large-scale apartment complexes.
In 1962, the Korea Housing Corporation completed the first phase of Mapo Apartments, which the National Archives of Korea describes as the first apartment built in a planned, complex-style form in Korea.
The first phase had six buildings and 450 households. A second phase, finished in 1964, added four more buildings and brought the complex to 10 buildings and 642 households.
That may sound small by today's standards. At the time, however, it represented a very different idea of urban living.
The complex included living rooms and balconies associated with a modern, Western-influenced residential style. But apartments were not immediately popular. The National Archives of Korea notes that the number of residents was initially low, and the new form of housing was unfamiliar to many people.
This is one of the most important parts of the story.
Koreans did not start out with a natural preference for apartment living. The apartment came first. The preference developed later.
Apartments Solved a Growing City Problem
The spread of apartments accelerated as Seoul and other cities faced the combined pressures of urbanization and housing shortages.
The government and public housing organizations increasingly turned to large-scale residential development.
The change was bigger than simply replacing detached houses with taller buildings.
Entire neighborhoods could now be planned around apartment complexes.
Roads, green spaces, playgrounds and other shared facilities could be developed together with housing. Seoul's records show that large housing developments included not only standardized homes but also facilities such as parks, schools, markets and playgrounds.
The Korea Housing Corporation's history shows how quickly the scale expanded: after Mapo in 1962 came a large housing development in Hwagok in 1965, Korea's first rental apartments in Gaebong in 1971, the Banpo apartment complex from 1971 to 1979, and the large Jamsil apartment development from 1975 to 1978.
The important change was therefore not simply that more apartment buildings were being constructed.
Apartment complexes became a way of building the city itself.
For a country urbanizing at remarkable speed, that mattered.
Then Apartments Became Something People Wanted
This is where the Korean story becomes more interesting.
If apartments had remained simply a government response to a housing shortage, Korea might not have developed today's apartment-dominated landscape.
But apartments gradually acquired another meaning.
As large complexes became more common, they came to represent not only efficient housing but also modernity, convenience and a new urban lifestyle.
The shift became particularly visible in the 1970s, when major developments in areas such as Gangnam and Yeouido helped turn the apartment into an increasingly important middle-class housing model.
Seoul's archival records describe the 1970s as a turning point when apartments began replacing detached houses as a major residential form.
This changed the relationship between people and apartments.
The apartment was no longer simply something the government needed to supply.
It was becoming something many people associated with a modern way of living.
The distinction matters.
It helps explain why apartments continued to spread even after housing supply became a more complicated issue than simply finding somewhere for a rapidly growing population to live.
The apartment had become part of the answer to another question:
What should a modern Korean home look like?
A Korean Apartment Is More Than a Building
Look at a large Korean apartment complex today and the residential towers are only one part of the picture.
There may be landscaped areas, playgrounds, parking facilities, security systems and shared amenities within the complex. Schools, shops and public transportation may be closely connected to the neighborhood.
This way of organizing residential life developed alongside the growth of large-scale apartment complexes.
Buildings in a Korean apartment complex are identified by building numbers, such as 103 and 107. Personal photo.
The Land & Housing Museum's material on Korean apartment culture describes apartments as part of changing lifestyles as well as architectural development. It also points to the mixed reactions apartments have generated: convenience and modern living on one side, and concerns about uniformity and social separation on the other.
That tension is important.
A Korean apartment complex can be highly convenient precisely because so much of the environment is planned and standardized.
But that same standardization can make different neighborhoods look remarkably similar.
And that may be one reason the Korean cityscape can feel repetitive to a first-time visitor.
The repetition is not entirely accidental.
It reflects a housing system that developed around large-scale planning and standardized construction.
Modern apartment complexes beside a mountain. The contrast between high-density housing and the natural landscape is a familiar feature of many Korean cities. Personal photo.
So Why Are There So Many Apartments in Korea?
There is no single answer.
Korea's apartment landscape developed through several changes that reinforced one another:
- rapid urbanization increased demand for housing in cities;
- housing shortages encouraged large-scale residential construction;
- government and public housing programs helped establish the apartment complex as a major housing model;
- large urban development projects expanded apartment neighborhoods; and
- over time, apartments became associated with modern urban living and the convenience of planned residential communities.
That is why explaining Korea's apartment landscape simply by saying "there isn't enough land" misses much of the story.
Land availability and urban density certainly matter.
But the skyline also reflects decades of housing policy, city planning, construction, large-scale development and changing ideas about what a good home should be.
The apartment did not simply fill Korea's cities.
It helped shape them.
The Apartment Skyline Tells Only Part of the Story
There is another reason not to stop at the familiar image of rows of apartment towers.
Not every Korean home is an apartment.
Korea's housing landscape also includes officetels, multi-family homes, detached houses and the buildings Koreans commonly call "villas."
And these names do not always mean what an English-speaking visitor might expect.
A Korean "villa," for example, is generally not a luxury countryside residence. The word is commonly used in Korea for certain types of smaller multi-family residential buildings.
There is another distinction that matters even more.
The type of home and the way someone occupies it are not the same thing.
Someone can live in an apartment without owning it.
That is where Korea's housing story becomes more complicated — and much more interesting.
The apartment tower tells you what a Korean home may look like. It does not yet tell you how Koreans actually live in it.
This is the first part of a four-part series on Korean housing. Next: Apartment, Officetel, Villa, Detached House: What Kind of Home Is This? After that, we look at how Koreans actually pay for a home, and the series closes by asking why Korean apartments are more than just homes.
For more stories about Korean culture, society, and trends, see Culture & Trend.
Reference
- Korea Policy Briefing (korea.kr) — 2025 Population and Housing Census Results, Register-Based (Korean)
- Seoul Metropolitan Archives — Changes in Housing Types in Seoul in the 1950s and 1960s
- Seoul Metropolitan Archives — Seoul's Urban Expansion and the Construction of National Housing
- Daehan Economic Daily (대한경제), December 2023 — Mapo Apartments, the First Large Apartment Complex, and Why It Has Six Floors (Korean)
- National Archives of Korea — The First Apartment Complex in Korea: Mapo Apartments
- National Archives of Korea — Related Records on the History of Korean Apartments
- LH — History of the Korea Housing Corporation