Wanted: Housing for free and cheaper home ownership

There is one undeniable fact that no studies or surveys are showing - a fact that is not widely known and appreciated. However, it needs to become mainstream if we are to have real solutions and a workable housing policy for this new century.

It is quite simply this: we need more of two kinds of housing. It may be unpalatable to some but we do actually need more housing for free, as well as more affordable ownership housing such as shared ownership.

Why do I say housing for free and not housing for rent, as others are saying, including an anonymous so-called 'expert' on the back page of the Il-Gens yesterday week?

Simply because the vast majority of cases we come across are people who are living off social assistance, minimum wage, low income or insecure jobs. They can't pay rent, at least not the rents the market demands. They can only afford the crazy old pre-1995 rents, which should not be called rents any longer!

Put simply, their income cannot sustain any rent, so unless we are planning massive salary or minimum wage rises, we are going to have to provide more housing which is, to all intents and purposes, free.

So Alternattiva Demokratika should stop banging on about reviving the rental market. The rental market is thriving. But what about those who can't pay the rents being asked? How will any of AD's ideas put rents down to levels that those on the minimum wage can afford? They can't. Government, and not the free market, will have to pay the difference.

And to that anonymous 'expert' on the back page of Il-Gens who claimed PPPs (private-public partnerships) would provide housing for rent for free, is he living on this planet? Government will have to foot the bill one way or the other.

It is now April, so hundreds of families have to leave their market rents in Bugibba and Qawra to make way for more lucrative holiday lets. People are paying market rents either with help from family, or because there is a hidden income in the form of non-officially ID-registered boy-friend. If all of Malta's single mothers (who are probably the largest group in modern private lets) were really living off social assistance there they would be hundreds of homeless families on the street.

Others, rightly or wrongly depending on your point of view, are paying the rent. Those who do not have this safety net either go back home to family or friends at this time of year or come to us, and are housed, whether temporarily in a hostel or later in permanent housing.

Homeless people are not on the streets in Malta, whatever silly reports try to imply, though this could start to happen tomorrow or next week, if we do not have enough supply to meet the demand.

The Church too, in its report which recently received a lot of coverage, only really spoke about middle class couples, such as the plight of young engaged couples who cannot buy a three-bedroomed flat for under Lm40,000 any more and who need to pay Lm70,000 to get what they want. No talk of the really poor at all. And to publish a silly report on the back page of Il-Gens calling the Housing Authority "a cash dispenser" was really the lowest of the low.

This is the same Church that runs a bank and could help young couples more if it wanted to do but it has to make profits like all the other banks, but let us please have some more honesty in this debate.

I hope the new loved and smiling Archbishop will stop these cheap shots, and the defence of the well-off, and the abandonment of the destitute, when the Church commissions further housing studies.

The report in Il-Gens also criticised us for importing ideas like shared ownership, which worked abroad and for trying unsuccessfully to make them work here. That is absolute rubbish! Shared ownership has not boomed and is not working well in the UK But it is working here. We just need more of it!

We changed basic tenets of it and have a model for which there is a huge demand. It is popular and fair despite the silly criticism from those who very cowardly in my view choose to remain anonymous, while being referred to as housing experts no less?

Housing needs more government funding, certainly. But it also needs more honest research, better thought through opinions and less selfish agendas. Before we were harangued by political blindness. Now those whose first duty is to be Christian and help those most in need are haranguing us.

We would really appreciate the Church's help on this one, and I am sure the new Archbishop, as well as all the wonderful Church people we work with, will put right the nonsense of a few.

It is I think at least partly to the Housing Authority's credit that housing is not as politicised an area as it was years ago.

After years of slog, determination and fending off of criticism from the party diehards who pollute our political maturity and the political landscape, we seem to be convincing at least some people that housing must be allocated on the same basis, that is, depending on need, not networking, and according to fair policies that apply to all.

However, there is still a lot of misinformation about housing. This is not helped by the fact that our University does not have a fully-fledged housing department and clearly needs one, especially when one considers the study that was recently published.

MLP Deputy Leader Charles Mangion recently wrote very sensibly about the need to have more graduates in areas where the workplace needs them. Among the hundreds of graduates in areas like communications and social policy we desperately also need some good housing graduates who specialise in this area and who are not part of departments with other agendas.

This, as others can corroborate, was actually one of the first things I quietly lobbied for when I was appointed chairman of the Housing Authority nine years ago. Then, as now, there were no graduates in this area, so I thought it was incumbent on our University to set up such a department, but sadly other departments, who want to keep housing as part of their remit, apparently refused to let go.

The result, eight years on, is a dearth of people with any practical and useful working knowledge in this area, and a report that won't take us anywhere sensible. Articles also regularly appear in the press, both partisan-inspired (of all colours) and Church-based, which really are missing the point in a big way, although I hope, not deliberately.

Housing is such an important area, and particularly so in Malta which depends on building construction so heavily. It was therefore a great shame to read a report which was so superficial, so misleading and in the end, pointless.

marisml@onvol.net

Marisa Micallef is chairman of the Housing Authority.