The Act on Support for Urban Complex Development was enacted and promulgated on February 6, 2024. It is scheduled to take effect on February 7, 2025. This new law encourages private project implementers to actively participate in urban complex development, unlike the urban public housing complex project (under the public housing special law) that was introduced in accordance with the government’s plan to drastically expand the supply of 3080+ publicly led metropolitan housing announced on February 4, 2021. The urban public housing complex project is a system designed to establish a new business model for station areas, semi-industrial areas, and low-rise residential areas that are underutilized and aging because of difficulties with redevelopment and reconstruction projects. Public institutions have become project implementers instead of existing cooperative-centered redevelopment and reconstruction projects. The urban public housing complex project is a development project that utilizes comprehensive acquisition (including land expropriation) to quickly promote the project and supply new buildings in the form of compensation in kind if the landowner so desires. However, the complex development project introduced in the Act on Support for Urban Complex Development differs significantly from the plan described above in that the private sector, including landowners, trustees, and real estate investment trusts (REITs), become the main project implementers, promoting the project by utilizing management, disposal plans, and sales claims. In this article, I examine the concept and characteristics of complex development projects, procedures, and special provisions for these projects and identify problems and revision directions for relevant laws. Since complex development projects utilize management, disposal plans, and sales claims as business methodsand the project target is an urban area with a high concentration of old and substandardbuildings, I describe such projects by comparing them with the provisions of the Urban and Housing Environment Improvement Act, which regulates redevelopment and reconstruction projects. Finally, I suggest that necessary actions to smoothly implement complex development projects include securing differentiation from other development projects, supplementing specific provisions on REITs as the newly introduced project implementers, and improving the sales claim system and consent rate centered on land area.
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