Seoul's "Housing Counseling Center" Handles 190,000 Cases Annually...Triples in Five Years

by Lee Jungyun

Published 11 Feb.2026 11:36(KST)

An apartment in Seoul. Yonhap News Agency

The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced on the 11th that the annual average number of consultations handled by the Housing Counseling Center at the Residential Stability Integrated Center has reached approximately 190,000 cases.

According to the city, the average annual number of consultations handled by the Housing Counseling Center between 2021 and 2025 was about 190,000 cases, roughly three times higher than the 56,000 cases recorded between 2018 and 2020. The number of citizens receiving consultations also increased from 22,000 to 51,000 over the same period.

The Housing Counseling Center has been operated since 2022, one in each district, under an integrated agency model run by Seoul Housing & Communities Corporation (SH), the first of its kind nationwide. This was achieved by upgrading the functions of the Housing Welfare Support Center, which opened in 2013. The number of dedicated staff members was expanded more than threefold from the previous 2 to 3 people to around 8. In addition to operating one Housing Counseling Center per district, the city also ran a total of 88 sessions of the mobile “Visiting Housing Counseling Center” last year in areas with a high concentration of vulnerable housing such as poor-quality accommodations, providing 4,103 consultations.

The “Housing Upgrading Support” program, which helps citizens living in vulnerable housing environments such as vinyl greenhouses and jjokbang (tiny single-room units), increased from 466 cases in 2020 to 3,001 cases in 2022 and 5,418 cases last year. Housing welfare consultations alone reached 244,000 cases for more than 59,000 citizens last year.

Emergency housing support, which provides assistance with housing costs, heating bills, and home repairs to people facing difficulties due to job loss, illness, and other hardships, also increased from an annual average of 2,112 cases before 2020 to 8,377 cases between 2021 and 2025. The support budget expanded 3.5 times, from a total of 620 million won to 2.25 billion won.

In addition, the city is operating the “Single-Person Household Housing Management Service,” which supports housing safety management and resolves daily inconveniences for single-person households. This service covers tasks such as replacing fluorescent lights, fixing entrance door locks, and carrying out small-scale home repairs. The number of support cases increased from 1,812 in 2022, when the program was first introduced, to 2,434 last year.

Choi Jinseok, Director General of Housing Policy at the Seoul Metropolitan Government, said, “The Housing Counseling Center at the Residential Stability Integrated Center is firmly serving as a pillar of housing welfare for citizens,” adding, “This year, we will strengthen close support for isolated and reclusive young people, homeless individuals, and jjokbang residents, and expand the operation of the Visiting Housing Counseling Center so that no citizen misses out on benefits due to a lack of information, thereby establishing a dense safety net.”