Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bassexpander]

I've been living with this for over a year.

There is a land dispute between a guy who owns a very small plot of land, and my university. Knowing our school plans to build a large building over this lot, the man figured he could make a mint off of selling his odd little chunk of land. The man demanded the university pay him 1,000,000,000 won for this small piece, which is smack in the middle of nowhere between two parking lots owned by the school. That's correct: 1 billion won.

When the school refused, he built this barbed-wire fence, which has fallen apart over the past year:

http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd16/bassexpander/fence1.jpg


Don't ask me why or how he came to own this small piece of land. I have no idea why anyone would end up owning a small piece of land in the middle of nowhere, totally surrounded by land owned by someone else.

The "war" has involved lawyers and a lot of money. The fence not only looks hideous, and is dangerous, it has disrupted my life. I am no longer able to exit my front door and easily walk to my school. I now have to go the opposite direction and around several houses to take another street to get there. There is a very narrow gap between his fence and my home. I've tried, and students try, to walk through this gap to save time. I've torn several shirts on the barbed wire. Someone brought a pair of snippers out and cut back the wire -- causing the guy to add even more. Then someone smashed the fence with a car a few times, leaving half of it to lay in ruins, as you see today.

Earlier this summer, the man, who also owns the drive which is the main entry to this lot owned by the school, decided to erect some cement pylons to keep cars from entering the lot entirely.

Not to be outdone, my school has decided to up the ante. Probably through legal action, the school has gotten him to remove one of the pylons to get a forklift in. Today, they started adding these large, ugly boxes to be used for gosh knows what. They'll probably loan them out to students or something as study rooms. To get them in there, they had to drop them over the top of the fence using a huge crane (at 7am -- it woke us up).

http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd16/bassexpander/fence2.jpg


All of this happens outside of my front door.

Korea Sparkling!

[IncognitoHFX]

This is all very immature on the land-owner's part and that fence had "epic failure" written all over it.

This guy wouldn't happen to bear resemblence to Homer Simpson, would he?

[bassexpander]

No, but he's insane.

Sometimes he lays on the ground outside on a mat, watching his little plot of land from afar.

[KumaraKitty]

Is his land just that little strip in the middle?? Utterly bizarre!

[poet13]

If the man has nothing else, then he does the best with what little he has.

Is he greedy? Sure.
Is he nuts? Might be.
Is he determined to get what might be the only "big score" of his life? You bet, and why not?

[fortysixyou]

So what are those little gray buildings?

[Juregen]

Exactly the same happens just outside my place

It is about 6 square meters big, and the owner put up a very ugly fence.

The city should just impound that part and keep it open to the public, it's right in front of a street crossing, which makes it impossible to use the Zebra's ....

[bassexpander]

Those little buildings are small shacks, like construction companies use to house workers who need storage, coffee breaks, or whatever. I hope they're not planning on a heap of construction next to our house, because last year we endured 6 months of brick cutting to install new windows on the administration building (30 meters from our front door). 7am to 7pm every day. Sometimes later.

[Juregen]

*mistake*

[fortysixyou]

Ahh man, there are few sounds worse than the sounds of brick-cutting in the morning. Seems like a weird situation right outside your apartment.

[bobranger]

Its his land and he can do what he wants as long as he is not breaking any zoning laws.
So what if he wants a big payday. Who doesn't?
Maybe he doesn't care about money so he made an outrageous price.
When he dies his children will sell.

[CentralCali]

OP: The fence has Hanyang University written on it (actually it says Hanyang Dae). Is that your university? At which campus do you work? I can't imagine that happening at the Seoul campus!

[bassexpander]

[GoldMember]

Go into a real estate agents office and often you can see a map of the local area, with lines all over the map that identify individual parcels of land.
Rather than nice square or rectangular blocks in a row, you can get weird shaped blocks so that the map actually looks like a jigsaw puzzle. On top of that but you can get small bocks of land located inside someone else's bigger block of land, kinda like Mr Kim owns the donut but Mr Park owns the hole in the middle.
It's Korea!, go figure.

[ajgeddes]

The first picture tells us where you work. You should know just in case you missed it.