"Renewal Isn't Erasure": A Newcomer's Case for the New Sindang

They point to rising foot traffic and market sales and to old buildings that were kept instead of torn down, and they suggest ways to protect older shops from rising rents.

​

I moved to Sindang-dong in 2023 and opened a six-seat coffee bar in what used to be a furniture shop next to Seoul Jungang Market. I live upstairs. People call what happened here gentrification. I think it is closer to a rescue.

​

When I first walked through the market, many stalls had their shutters down. The market had been shrinking for years. The secondhand market nearby had moved away, and big supermarkets took most of its customers. Without new visitors, I believe more of those shutters would have stayed closed for good.

​

The numbers changed fast. Average daily foot traffic in Sindang-dong rose from about 52,800 people in September 2021 to about 86,700 a year later. Sales at Jungang Market more than doubled between 2019 and 2023, and by 2024 nearly half its visitors were in their 20s and 30s. Those visitors don't only come for new cafés like mine. My customers walk to the tteokbokki alley afterward and buy corn and sesame from the grandmothers in the market. I buy my rice from the shop two doors down.

​

Most of us newcomers kept the old buildings' bones. We fixed the insides and left the beams, tiles and hand-painted signs. Compare that with the new-town redevelopment a short walk away in Wangsimni, where whole blocks became apartment towers. If this neighborhood had stayed quiet, I think developers would have come for it the same way. New businesses in old buildings are better than no old buildings at all.

​

I know rents have climbed, and I've felt it too. That problem is real, and it has fixes: longer leases for shops that have been here for decades, landlords who keep a legacy tenant on the ground floor, and newcomers who make a point of buying from the old shops. Seoul already recognizes long-running shops as Oraegage. That program could do more to protect them.

​

A neighborhood that never changes doesn't stay the same. It empties out. I would rather Sindang change with its old shops still in it.