If you travel through almost any major city in South Korea, one feature of the landscape is difficult to miss: apartment complexes stretching across the skyline. Seoul has them, but so do Busan, Daejeon, Daegu, and smaller regional cities.
For many Koreans, these buildings are not unusual or particularly glamorous. They are simply home. According to Statistics Korea’s 2024 Population and Housing Census, 53.9% of general households lived in apartments, while apartments accounted for 65.3% of the country’s total housing stock.
I have been part of this apartment culture for almost five decades. I first moved into an apartment in 1978, and since then I have lived in 12 different apartments. I still live in one today, and the home I am waiting to move into after construction is completed is also an apartment.
That long experience has made me skeptical of simple explanations such as “Koreans are obsessed with apartments.” Financial considerations certainly matter, but there are also very practical reasons involving maintenance, transportation, schools, security, moving, and the way Korean cities developed.
Why Apartments Became Korea’s Most Common Urban Home
To understand apartment culture in Korea, it makes more sense to begin with rapid urbanization than with traditional Korean houses or an ancient desire to own a large home. As industrialization accelerated after the Korean War, large numbers of people moved toward cities in search of work. Seoul in particular faced an enormous housing shortage, and providing large numbers of homes on limited urban land became an urgent issue.
Apartment buildings existed in Korea before the 1960s, but the 1962 Mapo Apartments in Seoul are often regarded as the beginning of Korea’s modern large-scale apartment-complex era. According to the National Archives of Korea’s history of apartment development, the project consisted of ten six-story buildings containing 642 households. From the 1970s onward, larger apartment complexes appeared throughout Seoul, and the development of Gangnam helped accelerate this style of housing. The model later spread to new towns around the Seoul metropolitan area and eventually throughout cities across the country.
My own memories reflect part of that transition. The first apartment I lived in, in 1978, was only three stories high, and my family lived on the third floor. We later moved to another building in the same complex, this time a five-story apartment where we lived on the fifth floor. Compared with the 20-, 30-, and even taller apartment towers that are common today, those buildings now seem very small. At the time, however, they were completely ordinary homes. Since then, I have continued moving from one apartment to another. If you are interested in how moving itself became highly systemized in Korea, I wrote separately about Pojang Isa, Korea’s full-service moving culture.
“Royal Floors”: Why the Same Apartment Can Have a Different Price
One interesting expression in Korean real estate is “royal floor,” or royal-cheung. It is not an official category, and there is no specific floor that automatically qualifies.
Traditionally, Koreans often preferred floors that were neither too close to the ground nor at the very top of the building. Middle or upper-middle floors could offer better sunlight, views, privacy, and less street noise while avoiding some of the heat, cold, or roof-leak concerns that sometimes affected the top floors of older buildings. These preferences can affect prices. Two apartments with the same size and floor plan, sometimes even positioned in the same vertical line of the same building, may sell for different amounts depending on their floor, direction, sunlight, and view.
What Koreans consider a royal floor has also changed. As insulation, waterproofing, elevators, and construction technology improved, high floors became much more attractive. In apartment complexes with particularly good views, the highest floors may now be among the most expensive.
My personal preference is almost the opposite of the classic royal-floor idea. Of the 12 apartments I have lived in, most were on the third floor or higher, but I have also lived on the first floor twice. I currently live on the third floor, and the newly built apartment I am waiting to move into is also on the third floor. If the conditions were right, however, I would happily live on the first or second floor.
Why I Still Like Living on Lower Floors
One reason is extremely simple: elevators.
On the first floor, there is no need to wait for one at all. Even from the second or third floor, using the stairs is usually an easy alternative. After decades of apartment living, small everyday conveniences like this matter more to me than having a panoramic view from a very high floor.
Another reason is floor noise. In Korea, noise transmitted between apartment units is commonly called cheunggan-soeum, or inter-floor noise, and it is one of the most familiar problems associated with apartment living. The Korea Environment Corporation even operates a dedicated Floor Noise Neighbor Center that provides consultations and on-site services related to disputes between neighbors.
Living on the first floor does not mean you can make unlimited noise. Running a washing machine late at night, showering at unreasonable hours, playing music loudly, slamming doors, or causing strong vibrations can still disturb people living beside or above you.
But when children run around or something heavy hits the floor, there is at least no household directly underneath a first-floor apartment. For families who worry about disturbing downstairs neighbors, that can be an important advantage.
I also personally feel more comfortable being close to ground level in case of a fire or another emergency. Modern apartment buildings have emergency stairs and extensive fire-safety systems, so I would not argue that lower floors are universally safer. It is simply one of the reasons my family and I feel more comfortable living closer to the ground.
Lower Floors Have Their Own Problems
My preference for lower floors does not mean I have had only good experiences there.
The first time I lived on the ground floor was in a fairly old apartment. During one winter, a drainage pipe froze and water backed up into the system. In older buildings, some drainage or rainwater pipes were positioned closer to exterior walls or exposed to colder air, making freezing more of a concern during severe winter weather. Newer apartment buildings may use improved pipe placement, insulation, and other measures to reduce this risk. Building design has changed considerably since the apartments I knew decades ago.
I also had a much more unpleasant experience while living on the first floor. A burglar broke a balcony window, entered our home, and stole a small amount of money and valuables. If you look at older Korean apartments or row houses, you may still see metal security bars installed over the windows of first- or second-floor homes. When I was younger, these were such a common sight that they seemed like an ordinary feature of lower-floor housing.
There were also cases of burglars climbing exposed gas pipes attached to the exterior of buildings to reach windows above ground level. Newer apartment complexes are much more likely to use CCTV, controlled building entrances, improved exterior lighting, and design features intended to make this kind of access more difficult.
Lower floors also provide less privacy in some buildings because pedestrians can see windows and balconies more easily from outside.
Even after those experiences, however, I still do not dislike lower-floor living. Choosing an apartment floor is often a matter of deciding which disadvantages matter most to you. For me, quick access to the ground, less dependence on elevators, and less worry about impact noise affecting a downstairs neighbor are worth a great deal.
A Korean Apartment “Danji” Is More Than a Building
Another important concept for understanding Korean apartments is the word danji. A Korean apartment complex is often not a single residential building standing by itself. A large danji may contain ten, twenty, or even more towers that share the same management office, landscaping, playgrounds, parking areas, security systems, and common spaces.
Newer complexes may have underground parking that keeps most cars away from ground-level pedestrian areas. Some also offer fitness rooms, small libraries, lounges, guest rooms, daycare facilities, resident cafés, and other community amenities. Older or smaller apartment complexes can be much simpler, so these facilities should not be treated as something every Korean apartment automatically provides. The difference between a complex built in the 1980s and a large complex completed recently can be enormous.
Centralized management is another important part of apartment life. Residents do not individually arrange every exterior repair, shared-facility problem, security issue, or waste-management service in the way a detached-house owner might have to.
The density of a large apartment complex also encourages businesses and public services to develop nearby. Supermarkets, clinics, restaurants, private academies, bus stops, and other facilities often cluster around large residential areas because there is a predictable population living within walking distance.
Modern apartment design has continued to change in smaller ways as well. One example is the treatment of air-conditioning outdoor units and the way newer Korean buildings are designed for increasingly hot summers, which I discuss in my article on how South Korea adapts to extreme summer heat.
This combination of centralized management and everyday convenience helps explain why some Koreans who dream about living in a detached house eventually choose another apartment when it is actually time to move.
Apartments Are Homes, but They Are Also Assets
It would be unrealistic to discuss Korean apartments without mentioning money.
Apartments are relatively easy to compare because one complex can contain hundreds or even thousands of units with nearly identical layouts. Buyers can check recent transactions involving the same building, size, direction, and floor range and quickly get an idea of the current market value.
That standardization makes apartment pricing different from detached houses, where land size, renovation history, road access, the shape of the lot, age of the structure, and many other individual factors can make direct comparisons much more difficult. Location adds another layer. Access to public transportation, schools, jobs, parks, shopping, and business districts can create enormous differences in price between otherwise similar apartments.
This is also why it can be misleading to talk about “Korean apartment prices” as if there were one national housing market. A newly built apartment in a highly sought-after neighborhood in Seoul and an older apartment in a smaller regional city can exist in completely different price ranges and market conditions.
For many Korean households, an apartment is therefore both a home and an important financial asset. My own experience is much less dramatic. I have simply spent most of my life living in apartments because they became the normal infrastructure of Korean urban life.
What Concrete Utopia Gets Right About Apartment Culture
The 2023 Korean disaster film Concrete Utopia offers a much darker way of looking at what an apartment can represent.
After a massive earthquake destroys Seoul, one apartment building remains standing. Survivors from outside begin arriving, while the existing residents must decide who belongs inside and who does not. The apartment gradually becomes more than shelter. It becomes a boundary between residents and outsiders, between safety and danger, and between private ownership and the needs of a larger community.
That setting is especially meaningful in Korea because the word “apartment” carries so many ordinary associations: home, neighbors, property values, management rules, school districts, moving, noise, security, and everyday convenience.
Concrete Utopia is broader than a satire about real estate. It uses one of the most familiar spaces in modern Korean life to explore belonging, exclusion, fear, community, ownership, and what people may do when the normal rules of society disappear.
That familiar setting is precisely why the story works so well. Korean viewers do not need much explanation of apartment management meetings, residents-only rules, or the sense that people living inside the same complex belong to a particular community. Those ideas are already familiar parts of everyday apartment life. After living in Korean apartments since 1978, I find that aspect of the movie much more interesting than the simple idea that apartments represent wealth.
I have lived in a three-story apartment, a five-story apartment, on the first floor, on higher floors, and now on the third floor. I have experienced frozen pipes, a burglary, elevators, floor-noise concerns, changing security systems, and the gradual transformation of apartment complexes over nearly five decades. And after living in 12 different apartments, my next home will be an apartment again.
Modern Korean cities, transportation, services, housing markets, and daily routines have developed around apartments for so long that apartment living has become an ordinary part of how millions of Koreans live.
The endless rows of apartment towers visible across Korean cities may look uniform from a distance. Inside them, however, people make very different choices about floors, neighborhoods, convenience, money, privacy, safety, children, and what they personally consider a comfortable home.
About the Author 🇰🇷
I live in South Korea and write about the small details of Korean life and culture that I experience and observe firsthand.
English is my second language, so I sometimes use tools such as Gemini and Google Translate to help with translation and editing. The experiences, observations, opinions, and cultural perspectives in my articles are my own, and I personally review and edit every article before publishing it.
My goal with Korea Core Info is simple: to share everyday Korea from a local perspective and help international readers discover things they might not always find in a typical travel guide.
I hope my stories and guides help you understand Korea a little better — not just as a place to visit, but as a place where people live their everyday lives.