The NYT’s Norimitsu Onishi ran a piece yesterday on Namhae’s GermanVillage:
GERMAN VILLAGE, South Korea In one of the southernmost points of the Korean Peninsula, hours away from the nearest city, a couple of dozen houses with sloping, red-tiled roofs and large white walls dot the side of a hill here. More are under construction, separated from one another by wide, sometimes cobblestone streets.
On closer inspection, as the setting sun enveloped the hill in a warm glow one recent evening, large and, well, German-looking men could be seen standing on a terrace or in a yard next to garden dwarfs and white picket fences. German could be heard, not only from the men, but also from the Koreans here.
German Village is only three years old, an improbable creation and the product of South Korea’s shifting needs. In the 1960s and ’70s, South Korea, poor and overpopulated, sent thousands of its citizens to work as nurses or miners in West Germany. Today, they and their German spouses are being welcomed back, especially in rural areas where urban migration and declining birthrates have reduced the population.
The authorities here in Namhae County took the invitation a step further by carving this village out of a mountain facing the sea. They offered cheap land and construction subsidies to any Korean nurse or miner who had lived in Germany for at least 20 years, requiring that they build houses in one of five German architectural models. The village will eventually accommodate up to 75 houses.
Read the rest on your own — it’s worth it. This is the best photo I could find of the place so far. Interestingly enough, Namhae is also planning to build an “American village” in the county as well, mostly for Korean-American retirees.
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The article says people who decide to live in the Miguk Village will have to relinquish their American citizenship, based on the gov’t not liking the Germans using their homes here as a vacation or second home. So, it will be interesting to see how many people go with that.
The Miracle of Han at work here. More of the government guiding the invisible hand. Adam Smith would frown at this. If the government required reliquishing foreign citizenship, only the most disenchanted, maladapted, or disgruntled people would settle there. Who would want them for neighbors? After all, most people take up citizenship because they believe in the ideals of their adopted society.
I hate clear-cut housing development.
So do I, KrZ.
Is it clear that this was forested land before it was Germantown, Kore-ay?
If this was former farmland, it wouldn’t be so bad.
Korea is a heavily forested country overall. While I don’t want to say that that makes it okay to go chopping down forests, it does make it difficult to develop anything new. Pretty much all the non-forested, non-farming land has already been developed.
Did they think the ?????????? would be a prison? Go there and don’t leave? In Europe, retirees who have the means to build a second home spend their time travelling, at least as long as health permits…
BTW, could we have an option to disable the LivePreview? It slows down FF to a creep…