Foreign students staying in residential blocks

The alarming situation of Sliema residents and the total loss of peace in summer has become truly amazing with no authority effectively safeguarding their rights, as rightly highlighted by Madeline Gera (August 2).

Further to the problems raised by teenage students raging in hotel balconies, the situation is alarming with apartment owners having to live all summer with students housed in residential apartments, which are packed with young tourists with no host-families.

It has become very common for so-called “agents” to house these young tourists in residential blocks with no permits for such use and to the detriment of other owners in the blocks. These young tourists generally run amock day and night with loud music and shouting from balconies and roofs, rendering the lives of families, and particularly the elderly, hell. They expect their money’s worth after paying these cowboy pseudo-agencies, mostly unregulated under any law. These youths are squeezed into apartments, eight or 10 at a time, turning these residential blocks into shady (or shanty) hostels or boarding houses.

The authorities should intervene to regulate this sector immediately. Besides being unsustainable for all Sliema residents and decent tax-paying property owners, it is also detrimental to other legal tourism accommodation. This situation is also giving a very bad image of Malta to other tourists who are very often short-shrifted by these so-called agents and advertisers of accommodation via the internet who seem to fall under no regulation.

Law-abiding citizens and apartment owners call on the authorities to immediately safeguard their properties and lives and their much needed summer rest.

The situation of rental accommodation in residential apartment blocks should immediately be controlled by proper licensing, enforcement and amendment of condominium laws. It is a well-known secret that most of this letting goes undeclared for tax purposes. Tax authorities should take note prior to the coming budget tax measures. Maybe then such abusive renting of residential apartments will be controlled and regulated.

The tax, licensing and tourism authorities should get their act together and stop this abuse of Sliema residents’ rights and peace in blocks where the owners have put in their well-earned life savings.

Sliema residents and apartment owners should not be taken for granted any more nor called upon only at election time.