On the 29th of last month, part of a temporary fence in front of a roadside in Ahyeon-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, was left bare. At the spot where the steel barricade had sagged and melted, thick black scorch marks remained. They were traces of the fire that broke out on December 28 last year. In front of the fence ringed with no-entry tape, Lee Jong-yeol (78) paced. For the past five years, Mr. Lee had made a 1-ton truck his base and lived here. The truck, charred pitch-black, was towed away by the district office that day. We asked Mr. Lee, left alone, why he could not leave the street. Mr. Lee's time had stopped 20 years ago, when the 'redevelopment frenzy' swept Ahyeon-dong.

To Mr. Lee, Ahyeon was "a home for life." Three generations from his grandfather on lived in the same house. Mr. Lee had his first job at a workshop near Ahyeon Station and worked as a delivery driver in the Ahyeon furniture district. After crisscrossing Seoul doing moving-center work, the place his weary body always returned to was the house in Ahyeon-dong. In 2006, his neighborhood was designated for reconstruction.

Ahyeon Zone 2, where he lived, was an old neighborhood of detached houses. At the time, reconstruction of detached houses was in many cases effectively the same as redevelopment because infrastructure was poor, but unlike redevelopment it was treated as a 'private project,' and there were no tenant-protection measures. Residents of Ahyeon Zone 2 were homeowners like Mr. Lee who had lived there for more than 50 years, or tenants who had come seeking inexpensive rooms. A neighborhood of people with nowhere to go became 'golden land' drawing speculation. It was a period when urban renewal, including redevelopment and reconstruction, surged amid the 'New Town frenzy.'

Not only tenants but also homeowners did not know when they might be forced out. Elderly people in their 60s to 90s quit work and stood guard over their homes. In winter Mr. Lee stood watch in the rain. According to him, the hired enforcers wrapped the elderly in blankets and carried them out. With large sledgehammers and crowbars they smashed windows and doors, then spread filth and sprayed fire extinguishers to keep people from going back in. Some people fainted; others had broken ribs. And on December 4, 2018, Park Jun-kyung (then 37), a tenant of Ahyeon Zone 2, took his own life. On the back of an ad leaflet he left the words, "I'm afraid of tomorrow coming."

After Mr. Park's death, the Seoul Metropolitan Government announced measures to support tenants in detached-house reconstruction with rental housing and the like. But there were no measures to help small homeowners like Mr. Lee to resettle. At the time, 2,357 households lived in Ahyeon Zone 2. Once it was demolished, 1,419 new units were to go in. By simple arithmetic, one-third of the original residents had no choice but to leave.

The compensation offered to homeowners was woefully insufficient. Mr. Lee said he received a consignment deposit amounting to about one-third of the then actual market transaction price of houses. Mr. Lee and the other residents took the money and scattered.

After moving in December 2018 to a semi-basement room in Eunpyeong-gu, Mr. Lee fought the enforcers even in his dreams. When he woke, it was not "my home." It was not the "haven" where he had bid farewell to his parents and grandparents and where he had borne and raised his children. On May 11, 2021, he returned to Ahyeon. In front of his former home, now transformed into a high-rise apartment complex called "Mapo The Classy," he parked his truck. Sitting on the cargo bed where he had once hauled moving loads, he wrote down the questions that arose: "If the only thing I have is my house, who is it that takes even that from me?", "Is this really the law of the Republic of Korea, to toss for a pittance the house where I was born and lived all my life?", "Is it an equal world that takes poor working people's property to fatten speculators?" The questions would not stop, and Mr. Lee could not leave Ahyeon.

During last winter's cold snap, to keep warm Mr. Lee set a kettle to boil and dozed off. The fire spread to both his hands and his face. The notebooks in which he had filled hundreds of pages also burned up.

Mr. Lee laughed, saying, "I came empty-handed and will leave empty-handed," yet he could not take his eyes off the place where he had stayed for five years. "I am asking for what is mine. My rights. Even if what is called the law is said to serve the majority, it must not take from those without power." Beyond the fence where he had written in red letters, high-rise apartments towered over his former home.