Oops, it happened again!

In another near miss on Monday, builders on site in Gzira undermined a neighbouring garden leaving it hanging in mid-air. It was reported to have given the 71-year-old resident the shock of her life. There can be no surprise at the report that cracks have also appeared all over the house.

The same thing happened some months ago in Sir George Borg Street, in Sliema, where excavations dislodged a massive block from under the house next door, necessitating its emergency demolition. Other houses around the site have suffered structural damage.

In Cathedral Street, Sliema the demolition of one house brought down parts of the one next door leading to the death of one person. Just behind that house, excavations for the High Street car park brought down the back of the property next door with a very near miss for the occupier. In Manwel Dimech Street, during construction of the Prince of Wales retirement home, the house next door became detached from its neighbour just up the road. It now sports a four-storey crack appropriately patched up.

More recently, trenching works serving the newly-constructed Palace Hotel, in Sliema, caused cracks to appear in the old chapel next door and in neighbouring residences. The repairs are said to be under way.

The grand classic of them all was the undermining of a house in St Paul's Bay which was left overhanging the void once the clay slope underneath collapsed during excavation works. We have been informed that the matter has been negotiated to its conclusion. In another case in the same locality, the people next door were not so lucky when the building they were in folded up on top of them. That case is still pending.

Cranes have collapsed, keeled over and generally made a nuisance of themselves for years. The incidents are too many to list. What is impressive about these incidents is that there is no known catalogue, no serial documentation of the established causes in order to establish new protocols and avoid repetitions. It all flows away under the bridge.

Somehow, in a country where airspace is of the most significant value, cranes traverse neighbouring properties and public thoroughfares without as much as a by your leave. Site neighbours seem unaware they have a right to object to or to demand payment for being subjected to the risk of damage. Local councils seem happy to demand payment for the erection of cranes in public roads with little care to the inconvenience of long months to passersby. They never seem to demand the siting of cranes within the building site itself even when it clearly could accommodate the giants.

The catalogue of damage to property, loss of peace and quiet, exposure to dust, exhaust fumes and noise, structural damage and stress from subjection to all this combined with very serious risks to life and limb, is conveniently unrecorded. Thousands upon thousands of families and neighbourhoods are subjected to it all as though it were their inescapable destiny.

The attitude not only of the building industry itself but of all public authorities seems to be that the risks and the intolerable inconveniences must be suffered by site neighbours as inevitable collateral damage in order to sustain a pillar of the economy. The myth of the immense importance of the building industry to the Maltese economy is sustained by successive administrations which have scrambled over one another to kick start a failing economy by boasting about giving birth to yet another mega project.

As the mega projects faltered and failed to kick start anything at all, the government opened up the whole country to redevelopment by relaxing height limitations. It meant the Sliemafication of the whole country. The newest terraced houses from Mellieha to Marsascala have become prime targets for redevelopment into mini-apartment blocks. Areas that had just settled down after decades of noise, dust and fumes have been drawn back into the eternal quarry condition they had just escaped.

With a GDP contribution to the economy just a little higher than that of the Cinderella sector of agriculture, the building sector has sold itself to the political class as a mainstay of the economy. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. It is rapidly becoming a major liability.

In the face of a huge surplus of vacant properties, particularly of apartments constantly shrinking in size as they grow in price, the building industry acquires more and more inventory, driving the banks to make 100 per cent 40-year loans available to new homemakers mugged into lifelong slavery. There is a bitter joke doing the rounds of a young couple buying the no-bedroom flat of their dreams at an extortionate price. Who needs bedrooms if both will be out working and doing overtime indefinitely to pay for it?

Minister George Pullicino's promise of new rules to govern the behaviour of the construction industry with regard to site neighbours sounds very much like an insolent electoral sop. It would have been much better had the government he supports not turned the whole country into a building site in the first place.

Perhaps the most depressing thought of all is that if Labour are elected to government in the upcoming election nothing at all will change. Their attitude is no different from that of the present administration.

Ironically, they are likely to be the first to complain that the euro has caused inflation, which has impacted our incomes and our competitiveness particularly in the tourism sector. Nobody but the Greens will point out that it is the construction sector that has pushed the prices of tourism services and all other economic activities above those of the competition: The price of property already impacts the price of a plate of pasta and of our humble cappuccino to an intolerable extent while the building site effect convinces ever more tourists never to return. Our secret? We do not depend on the building industry to finance our political activity. It helps us to see more clearly.

The promises made by the PN prior to 1987 to resize and redirect the building industry can and will be kept by the Greens. Runaway property prices can be reined in simply by adopting the anti-hoarding measures proposed by Mepa in 1995. How can we succeed where others failed? The difference is that we want to succeed and they wanted to say something that sounded good just before an election. The industry is perfectly capable of doing business without being a menace and a nuisance. It is waiting for somebody in authority to make it necessary, somebody that is not economically dependent on construction industry handouts.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - the Green party.

www.alternattiva.org.mt

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