Housing
Certain benefits come without charge. Typical housing for the ordinary North Korean family is provided free of charge by the work unit. It consists of a living-dining room, one bedroom, a kitchen, and shared toilet facilities, regardless of the size of the family.
Housing is an area in which elitism flourishes alongside a basic egalitarianism. Of all consumer areas, housing has consistently received top priority, second only to investment in heavy industry and surpassing transportation, agriculture, and light indusiry. Since the Korean War, the regime has constructed new housing for more than three-fourths of its population, urban and rural. Visitors to North Korea are inevitably impressed with the modern high rise apartments (many of them 12 to 20 stories high) in P‘yongyang and other cities and the cement-tiled cottages of rural North Korea. Both bespeak a higher standard of living than in neighboring China. North Koreans take pride in the significant improvement in housing since the war and the basic equality of the system.
Despite significant improvements in the quality of construction, it would be wrong to leave the impression that North Korean apartments — even the newer ones — are of superior construction. One observer noted “None of the walls are free from cracks. Most electric switches and outlets are defective. The wooden floors are not properly laid. Rain soaks through many of the roofs, the doors are narrow, and there are no screens on the windows."
People do not cite discrimination in housing as a major complaint, largely because of the regime‘s success in concealing the special housing available to the elite. The inequalities, however, are every bit as striking as in other consumer areas, in urban areas at least, the level of privilege is also disguised by placing special housing units in sections of the city where ordinary citizens have no reason to visit. Thus, the single-unit homes of the most privileged or the three- and four-bedroom executive apartments are visible only to those who live there.
While ordinary North Koreans typically share communal bathrooms with other families on the same corridor of their apartment building or in their complex of rural homes, residents of the elite apartments have private bathrooms — some with running water and flush toilets. The apartments of the privileged usually have other conveniences, such as elevators, central heating, and sometimes air conditioning and private telephones.
Some have spoken of the disadvantages of living on the upper floors of a high rise apartment building with no elevator or running water. North Koreans much prefer individual housing units in rural areas to apartment living in the cities because they so dislike carrying trash, water, coal. and groceries up and down so many flights of stairs. One of the luxuries of the executive apartments is that they are only two or three stories high.
The North Koreans have devised a novel system for ensuring that the privileged always enjoy the latest in modern housing. As new apartment buildings with the most up-to-date conveniences are constructed, privileged families are moved out of their old apartments into these new ones. The people Who rank just below them move into the old apartments, and on down the line. People are constantly moving in and out of apartments, in a slow but steady improvement in their standard of living. The family of a senior military officer is known to have moved nine times in l6 years, all within the P'yongyang vicinity. Since apartment buildings are occupied by people working in the same government ministry or factory, the residents are moved as a group, with no disruption of their social ties.
In addition to their own special housing, the elite have access to luxurious vacation homes along the beach on the east coast, in mountain areas near P‘yongyang, and as far away as the northwestern border with China. The North Koreans have created artificial lakes in these remote mountainous regions.
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