The Land of Apartments
Mid-December.
Finally, the semester was over.
On a Saturday afternoon at five o'clock, Ji Hye-min was getting ready to go out. She was heading to Mir City to meet Lee Yun-hyeok.
For a long time, Yun-hyeok had been deeply grateful for Hye-min's hard work and support, and he wanted to express his gratitude not as a politician, but simply as a person.
They had originally planned to meet after midterms, but Lee Yun-hyeok had been so overwhelmed with a government bidding project that their meeting had been pushed back to mid-December.
“To think our daughter is dating a politician.”
Her father teased her relentlessly.
“We're not dating!”
“Hye-min, whatever you do, don't let him buy you food!”
Her mother earnestly warned her, slipping some pocket money into her hand.
“If a politician gets caught up in something like this, it can turn into a massive headache! It's better if you pay!”
“No, that's not right!”
Her father jumped in.
“That would actually cause more problems! If you buy a high-ranking public official a meal, it could look like a bribe! It violates the Kim Young-ran Act!”
He was throwing around surprisingly professional terms.
“Don't worry, Mom, Dad.”
Ji Hye-min was confident.
“I've studied up on this thoroughly.”
The moment Ji Hye-min met Yun-hyeok, she began reciting her findings like a magic spell.
“They say if I pay for the meal, it could be considered an improper solicitation or an illegal donation. But if the Mayor pays, it might violate the Political Funds Act. Also, because of the Kim Young-ran Act, it's safest to keep the price under thirty thousand won per person, and we should sign the receipt together. On top of that, if any journalists, businesspeople, party officials, or religious leaders join us, it could spark lobbying suspicions, so we have to be extremely careful!”
Yun-hyeok was slightly taken aback.
“...Well, there's no reason for anyone else to join us.”
“I know... I was just making sure, just in case.”
Hye-min.
Hong Gi-beom's attack must have really traumatized you.
To think you'd worry to this extent.
“Don't worry too much.”
The laws regarding the receipt of money and goods were designed to prevent politicians from providing improper benefits to voters or receiving quid pro quo donations.
Furthermore, if Yun-hyeok was the one buying rather than receiving, the Kim Young-ran Act didn't even apply to Hye-min.
Even the National Election Commission would view Yun-hyeok buying a meal in this context as a normal social interaction. There was absolutely nothing to criticize. Why? Because—
“Because you aren't a citizen of Mir City, Hye-min. You're a Seoul citizen, you don't represent any organization, and you're just a student and a volunteer.”
“But couldn't they still launch an unfair attack like last time? Shouldn't we avoid giving them any ammunition whatsoever?”
That was true.
The political arena was a place where people would manufacture faults out of thin air to attack you.
But.
“If a person doesn't even have the courage to buy a meal for a supporter who has dedicated so much to them, just because they're afraid of old-school political smear campaigns, then they have no right to be in politics.”
“......”
“And above all else,”
Yun-hyeok said with a straight face.
“I doubt anyone would dare touch you. After all, you're the greatest political sniper of 2023, the one who single-handedly sank an elite politician like Hong Gi-beom right in the middle of enemy territory.”
“Aaaah!”
Flustered by Yun-hyeok's teasing, Ji Hye-min flailed her arms, her face turning bright red.
“Shall we go, then?”
They went to a Chinese restaurant with private rooms and ordered a course meal.
The two of them also turned on a brief livestream for the viewers who had been eagerly anticipating their meeting.
“Hello, everyone. This is politician Lee Yun-hyeok. And this is our editor.”
“Hello...”
Yun-hyeok said goodbye to the viewers and turned off the broadcast once the food started arriving.
In truth, this was a restaurant Yun-hyeok had frequently visited with Ji Hye-min during the early days of their relationship in his second and third lives.
As they ate, they bickered over her salary.
“Editor, it's time you started accepting a salary.”
“I don't want to.”
“A just society is one where everyone receives fair compensation for their labor.”
“But you've been working without pay ever since the Doma Elementary School incident, Mayor.”
...And so it went.
Then, Ji Hye-min brought up another topic.
“It would be great to make a video about what you did before Doma Elementary, too.”
“There wasn't really much before that. I was just working on Representative Park Dae-man's campaign.”
“Didn't you get the security cameras replaced at Raymi Castle?”
“How did you know about that?”
“People told me in the comments.”
The conversation naturally shifted to Raymi Castle.
“When I got off at the station to come here, I walked past the apartment complex and saw people fighting.”
Raymi Castle was located right in front of the station.
“Why were they fighting?”
“I don't know either. But they were arguing about outsiders using the daycare center or something.”
Ah.
Right.
Before running in the by-election, Yun-hyeok's father had mentioned something similar.
He had said that because the number of local daycares was shrinking, outsiders were trying to send their kids to the daycare inside Raymi Castle, causing friction.
“Hello!”
His five-year-old niece, Subin, bowed politely at the front door.
Yun-hyeok patted Subin on the head and stepped inside.
“Welcome!”
Yun-hyeok's older sister, Lee Yun-ha, greeted him warmly. His brother-in-law made a big fuss.
“Oh my! What brings the esteemed Mayor, leader of Mir City's four hundred and ninety thousand citizens, to our humble abode?”
“I'm here to address a civil complaint.”
Yun-hyeok shrugged.
“Working even on the weekends... I'm truly touched, Yun-hyeok.”
He had already asked her over KakaoTalk before coming over to find out what exactly was going on.
“You said you saw people fighting?”
“Well, I didn't see it myself, but...”
“It was probably the building representative for Dong 103 and Hanjun's mom.”
Lee Yun-ha let out a soft sigh.
“Her situation is quite pitiful, to be honest.”
About 1.5 kilometers north of the Raymi Castle complex lay an area called the Beomdol District in Yeok-dong.
The residents living there were constantly crossing over to Raymi Castle.
There were two main reasons. First, the daycares in that district had suffered severe financial difficulties and almost all of them had closed down, causing the local childcare infrastructure to collapse.
Second, if the residents of that area had to go to the "neighboring town" to drop off their kids anyway, they preferred to send them to the beautiful, clean daycare inside the newly built apartment complex.
As a result, there was a massive influx into Raymi Castle, causing the daycare inside—which had been designed to accommodate exactly the three thousand households of the complex—to burst at the seams.
Hanjun's mom was a particularly unique and heartbreaking case.
She was a single mother. Her baby had been born after her husband died in a tragic accident.
Combining maternity leave, annual leave, and everything else, she had barely managed to scrape by for four months, but now she had to return to work. She had to leave her tiny, four-month-old infant in an infant class at some daycare.
Her reason for choosing the Raymi Castle daycare wasn't just because it was in a new apartment complex. First and foremost, Raymi Castle was right on her commute to the subway station. It allowed her to minimize the detour she had to make with her baby.
Second, because her baby was completely defenseless and likely the youngest child in the entire daycare, she wanted to find the safest possible environment. But...
“I heard the security cameras at Raymi Castle are Quad HD...”
Hanjun's mom had said as she enrolled her baby in the daycare.
An apartment complex with such high-quality security cameras. She envied it so much. A space that cared so deeply about safety. The beautiful landscaping, the daycare right in front of the building, the playground where kids could run around, even the smoke-free policy. It was enough to bring tears of envy to her eyes.
In all likelihood, she would never be able to afford to live in a place like this for the rest of her life.
But surely, it was fine to at least send her baby to the daycare here?
It was a public daycare, after all.
It wasn't run directly by the apartment complex; it was operated by the local government.
So, wouldn't it be okay?
She had convinced herself with those thoughts.
In reality, she knew. She knew the daycare's capacity was designed based on the three thousand households living in the complex, and that the residents wouldn't welcome outsiders.
Even so, she had to swallow her pride and be shameless.
From the perspective of the building representative for Dong 103, it was an incredibly frustrating situation.
“Hanjun's mom, please! I don't want to be the bad guy here either.”
The fight Ji Hye-min had witnessed was actually quite unfair to Hanjun's mom. It hadn't been a fight at all; she had simply been on the receiving end of a one-sided scolding.
“I understand your difficult situation, but the apartment daycare is a common space for the residents! It might not be the individual property of each resident, but it is our shared property! Just like the hallways or the elevators! We leased this common space for free to build this public daycare. On top of that, the electricity and water bills used by the daycare are paid out of our maintenance fees!”
The representative of Dong 103 had also been pushed into taking the fall by the other residents.
There were simply too many outsiders. Even the residents of the complex were currently stuck on waiting lists, forced to look for daycares far outside the neighborhood. The residents' dissatisfaction was boiling over, and they were clamoring to block outsiders from entering.
The representative had to be ruthless.
“Even if the law says a public daycare can't be exclusively for the complex... this still isn't right. Please, find another daycare. I beg you.”
“I'm sorry.”
Hanjun's mom begged, on the verge of tears.
“But this is the only place I can go. I'm so sorry. I don't even have a car. I can't travel far with the baby in the morning. Please. Please...”
So that's the situation.
In truth, solving this specific problem wasn't difficult.
All they had to do was build a daycare in the Beomdol District. They could pour budget into the locations of the closed daycares to revive them. They would still operate at a loss, but absorbing those losses to maintain this kind of welfare infrastructure was exactly what the government was supposed to do.
But would that truly solve everything?
Probably not.
Because what Hanjun lacked wasn't just an infant daycare class.
It was also the kindergartens, the playgrounds, the security guards and CCTV cameras that ensured safety, the friends to play with, the parents of those friends, the social networks and educational information shared among them, the school buses, the mom stations, the elementary schools, and the after-school care programs.
Every piece of infrastructure in the environment where that child would grow up was vastly inferior to what Raymi Castle offered.
South Korea was a country ruled by apartments.
The things listed above were precisely what constituted the power of an apartment complex.
That was why everyone wanted to move into one. When the demand of three thousand households gathered, the mere act of those citizens uniting under a single identity generated immense political power.
Wasn't that exactly why the politician Lee Yun-hyeok had negotiated the security camera replacement there in the first place?
Of course, the ideal solution would be to build brand-new apartment complexes all over Mir City and let every citizen live in them.
But that was realistically impossible.
Half of Mir City's population lived in non-apartment housing. The key was not to force everyone into apartments, but to bridge the gap in living environments between apartments and non-apartments.
It's about time I played that policy card.
It was a policy Yun-hyeok had pushed forward in his first life. The results had been substantial. He hadn't introduced it yet in this life, but it was time to start the engine.
“I'm thinking of implementing a new housing policy.”
At the political affairs meeting, Yun-hyeok explained the policy to his directors.
An initiative to group adjacent non-apartment housing units or single-building apartments into designated blocks of 100 to 300 households, transforming them into cohesive residential complexes.
Key Measures:
- Reorganize and redesign local roads, installing perimeter fences to clearly define the boundaries of each block.
- Incorporate landscaping within the blocks and construct community facilities such as public daycares, kindergartens, playgrounds, after-school care centers, and senior centers.
- Grant priority access to these community facilities to the residents living within the designated block.
By organizing fragmented homeowners into a unified self-governing body, the policy aimed to narrow the gap in living environments between these areas and large-scale apartment complexes.
Compared to completely demolishing underdeveloped areas to rebuild massive apartment complexes, this approach offered three overwhelming advantages.
First, it was cost-effective. In the case of traditional apartments, even if built by private developers, local governments often ended up spending hundreds of billions of won on zoning changes, licensing, and infrastructure budget support.
Second, development was rapid. Demolishing existing facilities and building new apartments often took up to ten years, but integrating existing multi-unit housing blocks could be completed in a single year at most.
These two advantages alone made the policy highly worth pursuing.
When weighing the costs and benefits, the budget, time, and administrative power required to build a single complex like Yeok-dong's Raymi Castle could instead be used to improve over eighty percent of the non-apartment residential areas in Mir City.
And the third advantage:
The existing residential environment remained stable. While redevelopment projects triggered a massive displacement of original residents—most of whom were low-income—block integration focused on improvements centered around the current residents.
“What do you think?”
At its core, it was a type of urban regeneration project aimed at expanding social overhead capital (SOC) and supporting community restoration.
However, typical local government efforts usually stopped at building a single public daycare.
They never attempted such a radical, sweeping, and all-encompassing reform.
“Is that... realistically possible...?”
The Director of Urban Housing buried his face in his hands.
He could already see an overwhelming number of obstacles looming ahead.
Budget issues, negotiations with local residents, maintenance of community facilities, and even the inevitable interference of redevelopment brokers trying to ruin the plans.