Who Can Busan Keep?

18 Questions for Next Busan · Day 8 of 18

Hyunseung Kim (Gray) · May 28, 2026

June 12, from 57,000 won to 3 million

A studio room in Seomyeon — the central business district of Busan — usually books for 57,000 won on a Friday night. About forty dollars.

On June 12, the same room is listed at three million won. About two thousand two hundred dollars. Fifty times the normal rate.

This is not an isolated case. In late May, Busan Ilbo, the city's daily paper, surveyed two- and three-star hotels in Busanjin-gu and found rooms priced four-and-a-half to ten times their normal Friday rate for the nights of June 12 and 13. A separate audit by the Korea Fair Trade Commission and the Korea Consumer Agency, covering 135 accommodations across the city, found that average room rates for the concert weekend were 2.4 times higher than the weekends immediately before and after. Some operators raised prices by 750 percent. When fans began booking in Gimhae, a city forty minutes inland, motel rates there jumped to seven times normal.

On May 26, after winning at the American Music Awards, BTS opened a Weverse livestream and addressed the price surge directly — that fans coming to see them in Busan were being charged like this. Around the same time, foreign fans posted on social media that they would not spend a single won in the city outside the concert ticket itself.

For two weeks in June, Busan is losing the trust of the people coming to see it.

Nomads are people who test a city's trust

In Creator Society (2024), the Korean economist Mo Jong-rin defines the nomad city along five axes: flexibility, creativity, individuation, density, and networks. Long-stay travelers, workation visitors, portfolio careerists, remote workers, side-hustle creators — people who do not tether themselves to a single workplace, and instead move between cities to work and live. A city, by this measure, is judged not only by who resides there, but by who passes through.

What such people look for first is plain. Is the price predictable? Are the rules trustworthy? That is what a month-long stay means. You place a bet on a city, and the bet rests on a quiet assumption — that the rules will not change while you are inside them.

The BTS episode is the moment the bet breaks. A room that cost fifty thousand won a week ago is now several hundred thousand. A booking made months ago is cancelled for overbooking, and the same room reappears at a much higher price hours later. A city that operates this way is not a city with institutions. It is a city where the market is redrawn for every event. Nomads do not pass through such a city. They never arrive the first time.

When the market fails, temples step in

Since late April, Busan has fielded a joint task force — the special judicial police, the Fair Trade Commission, the Consumer Agency, and the city's fire department — patrolling accommodations around the Asiad Stadium. A price-stabilization meeting was convened at City Hall on May 22. The conclusions: enforcement, designation of fair-price businesses, and the temporary opening of public lodgings.

Enforcement, however, has a ceiling. The city holds no legal authority to set room prices, and the law that would allow it remains unrevised. If a hotel publishes its inflated rate on its tariff card, no regulator can compel it down. Busan itself acknowledges this limit.

So temples step in. The Cultural Corps of Korean Buddhism opened temple-stay programs across Busan and the surrounding South Gyeongsang Province to concert-goers. Beomeosa, a thousand-year-old mountain temple on the slopes of Geumjeongsan, will host twenty foreign visitors for free from June 11 to 14, with shared rooms and temple cuisine. Seonamsa is accepting fifteen, Hongbeopsa up to forty-eight. The twenty-one rooms at Naewonjeongsa, designated a public lodging, are already fully booked. Arpina, a budget hotel run by the city-owned Busan Urban Corporation, held its rates flat and sold out within days.

What Fukuoka's city government built a dedicated department to handle thirteen years ago, Busan in 2026 is patching together with temples and a public enterprise. This is a credit to civil society. It is also the shape of a city that has not built the institutions it needs. Without rules, every event must be re-decided from scratch. The twenty-six year pattern from Q7 plays out again, compressed into two weeks.

But unfinished is room for builders

Stop here for a moment. That Busan cannot keep people does not mean it cannot keep people. The opposite, in fact.

Physical. Busan is compact. Haeundae to Seomyeon, Seomyeon to Gwangalli, Gwangalli to Yeongdo — each crossing under thirty minutes. Of Korea's metropolitan cities, only Busan holds sea and mountain in the same frame. Port industry, an international film festival, a financial district, a working old downtown, and ocean leisure share one city. For a nomad who wants work, life, and leisure in a single place rather than spread across commutes, no other Korean metro offers it.

Geographic. From Gimhae International Airport, Fukuoka is one hour. Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei within two. The time zone matches Tokyo's, an hour off Hong Kong and Singapore. For a Southeast Asian nomad, Busan is a Korean gateway closer than Seoul. If Gimhae's international routes expand, all of Southeast Asia falls inside a two-hour radius.

Economic. Cost of living runs about sixty percent of Seoul's. A single household can still try a month here without strain. The density of coworking spaces, cafés, bars, and galleries is high relative to the city's size. For a foreign nomad who wants to live in Korea but finds Seoul too expensive, Busan is almost the only answer.

That Busan is not finished may be its sharpest advantage. Fukuoka is built. Its retention system has thirteen years of accumulated layers; the room to add something is narrow. Busan is different. It is being built now. Whoever defines how this city keeps its people defines the next form of the city itself.

Unfinishedness is not an embarrassment. It is an invitation, written to builders. The problem is that Busan is not writing it for itself.

Who stays in the next Busan

A city that keeps people is a city people come back to.

In Q2 we looked at the fifty thousand people in their twenties who have left Busan over the past decade. They did not only follow jobs. They followed cities that would keep them. A city with nomad infrastructure does not only attract foreign digital nomads — it becomes a city the young Koreans who left can return to, as portfolio careerists, creators, remote workers.

A retention system is not foreign-affairs policy. It is how a city operates. The question of who can stay here turns out to be the same as the question of why those already here would not leave.

On June 14, BTS leaves. The foreign fans leave. The room that cost fifty-seven thousand won reverts to fifty-seven thousand won. The question Busan must then ask itself is not how much it earned. It is two other questions.

First — will Busan create a single body responsible for keeping people? As Q7 made clear, City Hall has a Maritime Capital Policy Division, but no place that owns the city's ability to keep the people who arrive. Price stability, public-lodging coordination, foreigner settlement, long-stay infrastructure — each lives in a different department or affiliated agency. Will the city consolidate these into a single Settlement City Bureau, founded by ordinance so that it survives the next election? Or will it again call the temples next time a stadium fills?

Second — on the builder side, who will lay the first infrastructure? Settlement-visa consulting, month-long stay packages, foreigner-only coworking, nomad community building, an English-language city guide — these do not come from City Hall first. They come from builders. If Busan is being built now, the ones building it are the ones already here.

Who can Busan keep? The answer lies with Busan itself — at City Hall, and with whoever is reading this.

Busanloop · 18 Questions for Next Busan · Q8

Reference: Mo Jong-rin, Creator Society (Gimm-Young, 2024), pp. 330–339.