Maltese horror stories

A friend has been offered a house he would dearly love to buy. Part of it is rented to an old lady who lives elsewhere with her children but nominally holds the lease. Buying the house without full possession would be a gamble. The sellers reassure him: the old lady hasn't paid rent for a decade, maybe two. She has no real interest in the place. They don't dare promise to resolve the matter of the pending lease before signing the deed of sale.

The house is crumbling. The tenant has no interest in maintaining other people's property. By law, it is the landlord's obligation to see to repairs. The landlords won't fork out a cent because a year's rent wouldn't pay for a day's work, let alone for materials. Nobody will buy the property although it is offered at a very reasonable price. Nobody wants to buy a lottery ticket worth many thousands of liri. The house is crumbling.

Malta is crumbling. Thousands of properties stand vacant, stranded on the beach of counterproductive legal safeguards in favour of tenants. There must be billions of liri worth of properties which can never make it to market. The economy is suppressed by legal warping of the market. Everybody is waiting for something to happen.

Old Mrs Borg finds it hard to make ends meet. Fortunately, she inherited the lease of the palace she lives in from her mother. She pays Lm8 per year in rent. She doesn't think of it that way but her landlord has been press-ganged into being a part of the social welfare system. He has sustained her for decades. He was obliged to buy a house for himself (nobody would rent him a home at a rent he could afford) for tens of thousands of liri. His daughter will marry next year and he will be helping the new couple finance another home purchase. Every night he prays hard that Mrs Borg drops dead.

Jesmond works in a factory. He also works at his dad's engineering works. Weekends he waits tables to make a few more liri. He's paying off a mortgage on a house. He has a steady girlfriend, Charlene. She too works in a factory. On her days off she does take home work from the factory. Her mother and her younger brother sometimes help. Jesmond's workmate, Philip, has the house next door to Jesmond's. His granny died last year and he took over the rent. It costs him much less than a weekend in Paceville. Jesmond never got to watch a world cup match. Philip could afford to take leave and fly to Korea to watch the games live. Philip thinks Jesmond should get a life.

Victoria more or less chose to be a spinster. She devoted her life to caring for Auntie Rosina. Now in her early '50s, she is free of her charge but in no condition to enter the labour market. Auntie Rosina thought she would provide for Victoria by leaving her two splendid houses in her will. When Auntie Rosina rented them out she had a modest but comfortable income from them. Today the frozen rents wouldn't feed a bird. Victoria smiles when the tenants come to pay the rent. They're nice people really. She wishes them well. Sometimes she wishes them the joys of heaven soon so she can afford to eat well. She hasn't bought a new dress since Auntie Rosina died.

George owns a one fifty-third share of a house in Valletta. He's not sure where it is. One of his cousins sees to it. Seeing that the family can never agree what to do about it, the cousin oversees the sporadic squabbling and makes sure that nothing happens. Renting the house is out of the question. The family is waiting for a rich buyer. The richer the better because each family member has a minute fraction and selling a house for a few liri just doesn't make sense. George thinks that letting the place crumble doesn't make sense either but keeps his thoughts to himself. It's not worth rubbing anybody the wrong way for one fifty-third of a hope.

Jillian is a go-getter. She bought the last two years of a lease from the leaseholder, sold them to her own company and rented the place to herself. Splendid location, fantastic garden, beautiful façade: a great investment. She offered the landlords a pittance to buy the place. If they were reasonable they would sell at far below market value because they would never be able to evict her. The landlords refused to sell, they refused to accept the rent when the original lease expired and sued to evict her. Jillian brought up her children in a "stolen" house. She hopes to win the court case and convince them that crime pays.

Bastjan owns a rambling old house. He knows it's too big for him but he's too old to think of moving. When his son visited from England he told him that his in-laws had made a deal with the bank selling their property and renting it from the bank.

Coupled with their pension, the income they have makes them better off than they have ever been. They travel, they are the living proof that when you're over the hill you pick up speed. Bastjan doesn't fancy travelling but he would love to have some more money to spend. No Maltese bank would buy his house and rent it to him: too risky with our laws. The house is very valuable but on his pension Bastjan can't afford to have it whitewashed.

Martin inherited a huge headache. His family were property crazy. They seemed to have built whole streets of houses to rent. Perhaps they were just crazy. If the properties were free to put on the market, Martin figures he would be one of the island's major barons. For the past few years he has been one of the island's most frequent courtgoers.

A tenant sued him to have the roof replaced: estimated cost of repair Lm5,000. It was more than the total rent ever paid for the place. When a tenant dies childless, Martin celebrates. It really is like winning the lottery.

Most times it's the other thing. He has come to the conclusion that selling far below market value is a good deal. It has become his strategy to liquidate as much of the property as he can. He tries not to think of the tenants selling at 10 times the price next day. If he releases a fraction of the capital at least he can get it moving again.

What he cannot stomach is the correspondence with the tax people who question the low prices. The government is cheating him blind and the government accuses him of cheating. He would if he could.

Gianfranco worked here for a while. He thought that Valletta was a splendid city. Pity it was so shabby. It looked Third World. He wasn't here long enough to digest the intricacies of our rent laws. He never made the connection between the absence of a rental market and the land hunger that gobbles up the countryside at the rate of two per cent per annum. He'd heard that 25 per cent of our houses are vacant but he couldn't believe it. If there were that many houses available, how could the prices be so high? We would be risking a major collapse as happened in London and Tokyo.

All politicians in parliament know the situation very well. It's a stalemate. If one side moves, the other will rip it to bits snatching up the votes of tenants who feel threatened by change. Nobody dares propose a system to sustain tenants who truly need social assistance. Alternattiva Demokratika has invited both the other parties to address the issue in an all-party, all-stakeholder commission, to face the national challenge. The other two parties face the other way.

In a cynical calculation, both parties in parliament figure that landords are a negligible minority of ninnies sitting on billions worth of properties but unable to get organised. What nobody calculates are the threats to common causes. A disappearing countryside doesn't vote. A crumbling architectural heritage doesn't vote. The dangers of an artificially sustained property market are somewhere in the future, politicians will waffle their way out when they come to it. People who can't find a place to rent don't know it's the politicians' fault.

The situation is bad. It will get worse. It will unless we get a breath of fresh air into parliament.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party. www.alternattiva.org.mt