Let's rebuild our community

By Park Yoon-bae

Disputes over noise in apartments and multi-housing buildings apparently reflect the fact that Korean communities have fallen apart amid rapid urbanization and industrialization.

Many urban dwellers do not know who lives next door, upstairs or downstairs. They do not even say hello to their neighbors when coming across each other in the elevator or parking lot.

So they have yet to develop good neighborly relations with each other. In particular, busy fathers of most families usually regard their flat or house as a place to sleep in after long hours of work.

For this reason, most fathers have little opportunity to mingle with their neighbors. There is little room for them to engage in community activities. In short, it is as if they are living on an island without any human contact with their neighbors in residential complexes in big cities.

Against this backdrop, disputes over noise have pitted one resident against another, often resulting in arson and murder in extreme cases. Regrettably, the noise problem has already posed a serious threat to Korean society which long respected Confucian values.

A recent episode took place in Incheon, west of Seoul, May 13 when a landlord set fire to his tenant’s house after quarreling over noise. The fire claimed the lives of the tenant’s daughter and her boyfriend.

According to the police, the landlord living in the second floor committed the crime in a fit of anger. He allegedly could not endure the noise made by the tenant living downstairs when he repeatedly hit a punching bag for practice.

The tragedy is one of several serious disputes over noise this year. During the Feb. 9-11 Lunar New Year holiday, an apartment resident in his 40s in Jungnang-gu, Seoul, stabbed two people to death after complaining about the noise the victims’ family members made upstairs.

A 40-year-old man allegedly firebombed a neighbor’s home in Mok-dong, western Seoul, on Feb. 10, after arguments over noise. Six members of the family sustained severe burns after their house was set ablaze.

In Busan, a man named Lee, 52, was arrested on charges of attempted murder in March. He allegedly threatened a woman and her son living upstairs with a knife after they made noise late into the night.

The perpetrators must have been under lots of stress over noise. But their criminal acts cannot be justified under any circumstances. It would be better for them to try to solve the problem without resorting to violence or arson, no matter how difficult that is. Of course, those who have not suffered noise stress cannot measure the depth of pain arising from the problem.

From an architectural point of view, both the victims and the perpetrators are suffering from builders’ negligence in using soundproofing materials between floors.

Construction firms have been blamed for using substandard materials or breaching regulations in a bid to reduce building costs. They have built apartments and houses without paying much attention to soundproofing as they had no problem selling new homes by taking advantage of short supply and property speculation.

To a large extent, construction companies are responsible for this matter because they have not properly built flats and multi-housing units to prevent noise problems. The government also has to get the blame for failing to enforce tougher building codes.

Amid a slump in the housing construction market, builders are now pledging to provide quality flats and houses for consumers. But they still have a long way to go before supplying really comfortable and cozy homes for dwellers to enjoy their life without worrying about a feud over noise with their neighbors.

What’s more important is to reconstruct the crumbling community to help residents live together with their neighbors. Let’s make an all-out effort to turn recurring noise disputes into an opportunity to revive a sense of community, neighborly love and sharing, and tolerance. We should also learn to solve disputes through dialogue, not through violence and other criminal acts.

We might have forgotten the core values of our life over the past decades, while the nation has been engrossed in rapid economic growth and driving people into life in the fast lane. Let’s try to build a more inclusive society to make people happy.