If you watched Parasite, you probably remember the window: a narrow strip of glass sitting right at street level. It is one of the film's best-known images. Parasite went on to become the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture, and it put banjiha on the map for a lot of North American viewers. At the 92nd Academy Awards it took four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. The film premiered at Cannes on May 21, 2019 and opened in South Korea on May 30.
A film is a story, though, and banjiha are a housing type with a history and a set of numbers. This guide looks at what the movie built and what the real housing type is, then at where Korea is taking it.
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| A low window just above the sidewalk is the telltale sign of a banjiha. |
What the Film Built and What Is Real
The semi-basement home and the street around it in Parasite were built on a set, partly because the flood scenes required it. According to published accounts of the production, the production designer, Lee Ha-jun, visited abandoned villages and towns scheduled for demolition to study how such places look. One commentary on the film notes that the director built the set inside a water tank so the home could be submerged easily.
So the film's house is a designed set informed by research, and you cannot visit it. The housing type behind it is real, and the data paints a quieter and more varied picture than a two-hour story can.
What Banjiha Means (Quick Guide)
Banjiha means "half underground": ban is half and jiha is basement. A banjiha is a home on a floor that sits partly below street level, often with a small window near the top of the wall at ground height.
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| A sunlit residential alley where low windows sit just above the pavement. |
The law is less tidy than the word. According to Asia Economy, Korean rules define a basement as a floor where the average height from the floor to the ground is at least half the floor's height. A semi-basement has no clear legal definition of its own and is generally understood as a floor sunk less than halfway. That is why official counts usually group basement and semi-basement homes together.
Daylight is the defining trade-off. A March 2024 Asia Economy report on Seoul rentals described semi-basement rooms where residents keep fluorescent lights on during the day and put dehumidifiers in the corners, while ground-floor rooms nearby get natural light. Stars and Stripes lists flooding, mold, poor ventilation and limited sunlight as the main environmental challenges. On paper, housing standards call for appropriate soundproofing, ventilation, lighting and heating facilities, and the 2020 Asia Economy report said many residents still face flood risks and substandard conditions.
North American readers know a close cousin: the basement suite or garden-level apartment. It also sits partly below the street, it also rents for less than the floors above, and it raises the same questions about light, damp and drainage. The difference in Korea is scale: about 5 percent of Seoul's housing by the 2022 figures, a share large enough that the city has built a dedicated policy around it.
Why Korea Has Them (Quick Guide)
Banjiha started life as a security requirement. According to Stars and Stripes, basement spaces became required in certain buildings in the 1970s as emergency shelters, amid tensions with North Korea. As Seoul grew fast and housing ran short, those underground spaces turned into affordable rentals, and legal reforms in the 1970s and 1980s permitted people to live in them.
The rest follows from simple arithmetic. A room below street level costs less than the same room a floor up, so it takes in people who are priced out of the floors above. In one March 2024 report, a real estate agent near Ahyeon-dong said ground-floor units there start at 600,000 to 700,000 won a month, while a semi-basement goes for about 500,000 won. A headline on that report summed up the gap as the extra cost of seeing sunlight. For scale, the same report cited a Seoul studio average of about 542,200 won in 2023, from the Dabang platform.
Banking experts quoted there said worries about jeonse fraud and the interest-rate climate had pushed more renters toward monthly rent, which keeps demand up for the cheaper rooms on the market.
Who Lives in One, by the Numbers (Quick Guide)
Nationwide, about 327,000 households lived in basement or semi-basement homes in the 2020 census, roughly 1.5 percent of the total, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily. The Korea Times put about 96 percent of them in the Seoul metropolitan area. Seoul itself had about 200,000 such households in the figures cited in 2022, around 5 percent of the city's housing, and Gwanak District had the highest concentration with about 20,000 homes.
The long-term trend points down. An Asia Economy report cited national data showing the share of households in basements or semi-basements falling from 3.7 percent in 2006 to 1.9 percent in 2018. Seoul's own count fell from about 300,000 households in 2010 to about 200,000 by 2022, and the 2020 national figure of 1.5 percent continues that slope.
Counts vary by source, year and definition. A 2023 report cited roughly 348,000 households in the metropolitan area as of 2022, so treat the figures here as a range and not a single exact tally.
The household mix is wider than one fictional family. The same March 2020 report found 38.9 percent single-person households and 28.9 percent with four or more members. A little over half lived in homes of 40 square meters or less, 58.9 percent paid monthly rent, and 25 percent held jeonse leases, Korea's lump-sum deposit system.
Lower-income households are a large part of the picture. The report counted about 29 percent as basic livelihood recipients, a government welfare category, which is part of why policy treats banjiha as a welfare question as well as a building-code one.
What Changed After 2022
Seoul decided to phase the housing type out. After the heaviest rainfall in 115 years of records in August 2022, during which some of the deaths occurred in basement homes, the city announced that it would stop issuing permits for new basement and semi-basement homes. Existing ones would get a grace period of up to about 20 years, with incentives for owners to convert them to non-residential use, per the Korea JoongAng Daily.
Restrictions were not entirely new. The Korea Times noted that Seoul had already restricted permits for buildings with semi-basement housing after heavy rains in 2010, and NBC News cited a 2012 city regulation on new construction.
The national government followed in February 2023. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport announced a plan to prohibit new underground and semi-basement homes, with limited exceptions for low-flood-risk buildings and some on slopes, and to buy and remodel existing ones into community facilities. It said it would move gradually, taking into account that some low-income households have no other options.
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| Flood boards are one of the practical safeguards at below-street entrances. |
The city also moved on the water side of the problem. NBC News cited 1.15 billion dollars of spending over the coming decade to build six underground tunnels to drain rainwater.
For the people who live in these homes, the plan came with housing measures. Seoul said it would prioritize neighborhoods with previously flooded semi-basement homes when it chooses areas for redevelopment, and its housing corporation would buy existing banjiha to turn them into warehouses or community facilities. Support for residents who move above ground began with a voucher of up to 200,000 won a month for up to two years, announced alongside the 2022 plan. Separately, the city projected roughly 230,000 new apartments from redeveloping 118,000 aging public housing units by 2042. A 2026 report in Kyunghyang Shinmun, citing a civic group, counted 11,396 households relocated with government support, nearly all of them into public rental housing.
Progress has been gradual. Asia Economy reported in October 2025 that Seoul's budget for its semi-basement purchase project fell from 446.6 billion won in 2023 to 159.3 billion won in 2025, with the city pointing to under-target results and to appraised values that came in below what sellers expected. Critics quoted by the Korea Times had noted in 2022 that similar announcements had been made before, and they worried that restrictions could narrow options for low-income renters unless public rental housing keeps pace. The same civic group reported that about 22 percent of flood-risk semi-basements still lacked flood boards, with landlords worried about what the installations might do to property values.
Seeing Banjiha in Seoul
Once you know the shape, you start spotting banjiha in residential neighborhoods. They tend to show up as a low window set just above the sidewalk, on the ground level of an ordinary low-rise building.
People live behind that glass. The courtesy that applies to any residential street applies here too: no photos aimed at windows, and no treating a neighborhood like a film location. The movie is a good reason to learn the history, and the street itself is somebody's everyday life.
Seen that way, the window in the film is the visible end of a long housing story that began with a security rule in the 1970s and is still being rewritten.
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