Many families moved into new houses in Songhwa Street, a new street built in the capital city of Pyongyang last April. The owners of the houses are ordinary working people.

Looking at them laughing and crying with happiness, people recollected the stories about the construction of the street.

The ground-breaking ceremony for the construction of 10 000 flats in the Songsin and Songhwa areas in Sadong District of Pyongyang was successfully held in March last year.

The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un , in his speech at the ceremony, said as follows:

The Eighth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea and the Second Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Party held earlier this year took the decision to construct 50 000 flats in our capital city during the five-year plan period by building 10 000 every year, while pushing ahead with housing development across the country.

Building 50 000 modern flats in Pyongyang, the capital city of our great country, is something our Party has long intended, prepared for and aspired to, in order to provide its citizens with more cultured and stable living conditions.

This large-scale house-building operation introduced by our Party and state is not designed for the pursuit of financial profit; it is an ennobling undertaking to turn the state’s assets and the fruits of their creative labour into benefits for the working masses.

The construction of Songhwa Street was the first phase of the project for building 50 000 flats in Pyongyang.

The declaration of the project was an eye-opener to all the Korean people. The number of 50 000 was gigantic and what’s more, the country was faced with the worst condition unprecedented in its history. Therefore, it was not so easy for it to decide the construction of 10 000 flats in Pyongyang every year.

Kim Jong Un gave detailed instructions for the designing of Songhwa Street and project schedules and visited the construction site to encourage soldier-builders.

Busy as he was with a lot of state affairs, he paid close attention to all layouts and designs of 10 000 flats in order to ensure that they were built into modern flats of new styles, quite different from those built in the past.

One March day in Juche 110 (2021), he unfolded a bold operation to erect a skyscraper. He said in the following vein: We erected a 70-storeyed building in Ryomyong Street. After learning about the geological conditions of the area, we should erect an 80-storeyed building 20 storeys higher than the original one symbolic of 10 000 flats in Pyongyang. It is important to strictly guarantee the dynamic safety of the building.

Later, he saw documents regarding the construction, including the layouts of buildings in the area of 10 000 flats and its trunk road and the designs of individual buildings, and ensured that all problems were solved on a priority basis.

In those days he examined more than 1 000 layouts of 10 000 flats in the Songsin and Songhwa area.

During his visit in March to the construction site nearing completion, he said with pride that it is an obvious show of justness of our Party’s idea on architectural beauty, potentiality of the Juche-based self-supporting economy and invincibility of single-minded unity of our Party and the masses that we have successfully built 10 000 modern flats by our own efforts in a short span of time.  He went on to say in satisfaction that we would soon see the people cutting a ribbon themselves and moving into new houses and that his another wish would come true. He called for completing the project by the Day of the Sun (April 15, birth anniversary of President Kim Il Sung ).

Under his meticulous guidance and concern, 10 000 flats of multi-storey and high-rise apartment buildings of various styles, including an 80-storeyed skyscraper, and public health, educational and welfare service facilities were laid out conveniently in the area covering over 50 hectares, and several parks, overhead bridges and decorative structures of peculiar styles were built in good combination with residential districts.