Lawmakers’ districts are scattered across the country. Busan, Gwangju, Chuncheon, Jeju — that is where the votes come from. Yet when their real-estate holdings are placed on the same map, the scattered dots converge as if pulled toward a single point. That point is Seoul, and within it, Gangnam.The map that wins votes and the map that builds wealth are not the same shape.
Two maps overlaid on one person
A lawmaker carries two kinds of coordinates. One is where the people who elected them live — the electoral district. The district is the starting point of representation; it defines whom a lawmaker speaks for. The other is where their own assets actually sit — the location of their real estate. Nothing guarantees these two coordinates land on the same spot. The district is fixed by an election; the property is fixed by the market and by choice.
This piece lays those two maps on top of each other. We gathered the provinces and cities where buildings and land in public asset disclosures are located, and set them beside the same lawmaker’s district. The conclusion first: the two maps diverge. The map of representation spreads across the country, while the map of ownership narrows to the metropolitan area and, deeper still, to Gangnam. Let us trace the size of that gap in numbers.
Where the property is — the tilt toward the metropolitan area
The top location for real estate is Seoul (192 lawmakers), followed by Gyeonggi (91). Together those two outweigh every other province and city combined. Drop to third-place South Gyeongsang (32), fourth-place South Jeolla (30), and fifth-place Busan (25), and the numbers fall sharply into single-digit territory. No matter where a lawmaker’s district is, their property tilts toward the metropolitan area. Votes come evenly from across the country; assets gather in one city.
The most direct evidence lies with the non-metropolitan lawmakers. Of the 126 lawmakers whose districts lie outside the metropolitan area, 92.9% own real estate within it. Nine in ten of those who represent Busan, Gwangju, or Gangwon have anchored their assets in Seoul, Gyeonggi, or Incheon. That the people who represent a region and the place they keep their assets diverge this far is the clearest sign of the two maps pulling apart.
But it is not ‘abandoning the region’ — dual ownership
Here a hasty conclusion has to be blocked. Reading 92.9% as ‘lawmakers abandoned their region and left for Seoul’ would be a misreading. Count the same 126 by their own districts and 95.2% also own real estate in their home district.Owning a home in the metropolitan area is a different thing from owning no home in one’s region. Most hold both.
So the precise word is not ‘departure’ but dual ownership— a structure of holding a home in the region and a home in the metropolitan area at once. The district home is the base of representation and daily life; the metropolitan home is a residence for legislative work and — at the same time — an asset. Nothing was given up; both coordinates are occupied together. Only with this caveat can the next figure be read without exaggeration.
Narrow it further and Gangnam appears — one zoom in
The metropolitan area is large. Everything from Incheon to Gapyeong counts as metropolitan. So ‘metropolitan ownership’ alone is a weak signal. Tighten the lens one more step, into Gangnam, Seocho, and Songpa — the three so-called Gangnam districts — and the signal sharpens.
26.2% of lawmakers with districts outside the metropolitan area — one in four — hold real estate in the three districts of Gangnam, Seocho, and Songpa.Broaden it to all districts and the figure is still 24.9%. This is a clear gravitational pull of assets toward Gangnam, one that cannot be fully explained away as merely a Seoul residence for legislative work. As the lens narrows from the wide net of ‘the metropolitan area’ to the small knot of ‘the three Gangnam districts,’ the divergence does not fade — it grows sharper.
What Gangnam absorbs is not ‘area’ but ‘value’
Gangnam’s gravity shows up in another dataset too. Aggregate the real estate lawmakers declared by declared value for each district nationwide, and the three districts — Gangnam (about ₩82.8 billion), Seocho (about ₩77.8 billion), and Songpa (about ₩49.4 billion) — sum to roughly ₩210 billion, or 32.4%of the nationwide district total (about ₩648 billion). Just three of the country’s 226 districts take a third of all declared asset value.
More striking is the asymmetry between count and value. In the same tally, the Gangnam three account for just 6.4% of the number of properties. By count they are a small dot; by value they are an enormous mass. Gangnam is not where lawmakers absorb many properties — it is where they absorb the properties that are worth the most. If the map of representation spreads across the nation by area, the map of ownership condenses onto Gangnam by value.
The two maps overlaid — and representation
In the end, two maps overlap within a single person. The map of representation that wins votes spreads across the entire country, but the map of ownershipthat builds wealth narrows to the metropolitan area — and within it, to Gangnam. Even though 92.9% own a home in the metropolitan area, most (95.2%) also keep a home in their own district, so it is not a story of ‘abandoning the region.’ Still, a signal narrower and clearer than simple ‘metropolitan-area ownership’ — the gravity of assets gathering in the three Gangnam districts — illuminates one facet of what we commonly call ‘regional representation.’
Why does this matter? Representation is, at root, a question of whose life one stands responsible for. Where a lawmaker anchors their assets is a private choice — but when that choice leans all one way, when the assets of those who represent the regions converge on Gangnam, it is no longer only a private matter. If the physical and economic radius of those who represent the regions ultimately narrows to one neighborhood in one city, then the distance between ‘representing the whole country’ and ‘keeping one’s assets in Gangnam’ is itself the distance of representation. This piece is an attempt to measure that distance not with blame but with data.
Method & source · Real estate is based on the province/city where buildings and land are located in the public official asset disclosure (2025), and includes jeonse and leasehold rights. Districts were merged by matching the regional names of 22nd Assembly lawmakers in the political-funds data to lawmaker names; proportional-representation members were excluded. The district-to-ownership figures — metropolitan ownership (92.9%), simultaneous home-district ownership (95.2%), and the Gangnam-three share (26.2% non-metro, 24.9% overall) — are a separate aggregation that joins asset disclosure with district information, computed on a different basis from the property-location data used on the map. The Gangnam-three declared-value share (32.4%) is supplementary context based on per-district declared-value aggregation (declaredValueSum); because it is a different unit, it is not compared directly with the lawmaker counts above. Sources · Public Service Ethics System (asset disclosure) · National Election Commission (political funds). Data tally · kookrator.