The English expression wanting to have your cake and eat it, often used to explain why you can’t have everything in life, is not the easiest of expressions to translate into Maltese culture. As we witness during most of the hot debates engaged in here about everything, every group does actually expect to have its cake or imqaret, and eat it or them too. Nowhere is this clearer right now than the current debate going on about the Budget measures, as they may or may not affect the property market.

Let’s start with the easy thing, that beautiful cake known as home ownership.

Home ownership is generally a good thing.

First there is nothing wrong with people trying to be or wanting to be home-owners. But there is something fundamentally crazy about us all sitting on our property expecting it to increase in price by leaps and bounds, and complaining at the same time that house prices will soon be, or are already, beyond the reach of our children. We can’t happily sit on or live off great investments, and hope that our kids can easily find affordable housing at the same time. The two can’t live together, can’t marry, not even for a short while.

While it is reasonable to want to own your own home, it is not reasonable to expect it to always rise in value, to expect to be able to make a killing from property at every opportunity. But making a killing from property is now part of our culture, part of this country’s feel good factor, and many people, speculators, estate agents and even owners of second homes (who now have, thanks to this budget, a far fairer way of being taxed if they hold on to their property for say seven plus years) have done very very well out of property in the past years, as property prices actually doubled over a very short, some say too short, period of time.

This doubling in price and sometimes more, also happened in the UK where your average London home is now worth just under £400,000, and is unaffordable to many unless perhaps banks start giving lifetime loans!

Now economists and others will suggest various ways how prices could be controlled, or ways in which house price increases could perhaps be slowed. Funnily, and surprisingly enough, building a lot more homes is not one of them. Housing is a commodity that is unlike any other. It grows in value the longer you have it, unlike your car, or washing machine, which instantly depreciates in value the minute it leaves the showroom.

Somehow or other, some form of taxation, either on land or on property transactions is going to have to come in to slow down the rate of speculation at least.

I found it simply amazing to read, if he was quoted correctly of course, that the Finance spokesperson for AD had said that the budget measures were bad because they were going to encourage property hoarding in the short term. How “ungreen” is that. Why is it desirable for people to buy and sell property so rapidly? Who really benefits if you can buy and sell in a year and make a quick profit?

Don’t forget, most of us don’t buy outright, particularly not first time buyers. As Toby Lloyd said recently, “House prices reflect what people are prepared to be encouraged to borrow from the banks.” So housing wealth is a good thing, but it cannot be an end in itself for a country. All over the world property bubbles are in danger of bursting, and it was wise of the government to introduce some measures to slow down the bubble, or at least get the bubble to deflate a little less explosively.

Essentially, we need to separate the perfectly reasonable desire to own our own home from the totally unreasonable expectation that its value always has to go up at the expense of the wider community. Of course it’s good that our homes go up in value. But I think we, the middle class, middle income generation who are lucky to be part of the property owning democracy, must now give a breathing space to the next generation who need and want to get on the property ladder.