(As seen on a billboard in the London Underground, well, not yet anyway!)
Perhaps the most honest branding of the Maltese archipelago would be to focus on our unique and historical, indeed archaeological (!) tendency, since the time of the temples at least, to build, to over build and only lately to build without much beauty.
We should all, particularly the possibly more intelligent and well read among us who bother reading a newspaper, recognise that this building mania has been with us for thousands of years.
Building is as much part of our psyche as eating pasta is for the Italians, producing fine cheeses for the French and Swiss, riding bicycles for the Chinese in Beijing, dancing for the Andalusians, or saying “have a nice day” for the Americans!
We have too much of everything built for our size, or at least so it appears. Too many temples, too many dug out tombs, too many churches and chapels, too many homes. This is just the island of too many and too much as far as building is concerned. Rather than this stupid divide between the now dreaded and supposedly all dreadful kuntratturi on the one hand, and the so-called ambjentalisti on the other, we should really be tackling a national tendency to overbuild, as a nation.
Building, in other words, has become a national problem, which cannot be solved just by vilifying and scapegoating anyone who builds, while we pretend that the rest of us, who also enjoy the fruits of the building industry, just wash our hands of all responsibility and sit around and call each other names via placards, letters to newspapers or whatever.
Archaeologists have always questioned not just the number of temples that were built here, but why so many, and who and what sustained them? Similarly today, as you consider all our statistics related to our building stock, you have to marvel at how many are unused, how many appear overvalued, how many are traded and retraded before they are even built (and sold and resold subject to permit sometimes too) almost as if Malta’s building sites are our real stock exchange.
Nothing logical happens here in term of housing. The laws of supply and demand don’t appear to bring down prices. Run down properties don’t necessarily decrease in value. Newly built properties are sold at a premium simply because of fuq il-fil (neat pointing) finishes, or the now much loved graffiato rendering.
Buyers either want shiny white and shiny new, or the most antique of little houses with caves for rooms, which a whole generation of Malta’s new and few talented architects and interior designers manage to transform into the coolest of pads. People expect high prices for their homes when they sell them, but are shocked at rents of Lm100 to Lm200, as if renting should intrinsically be free, and owning should intrinsically be pricey.
Wherever you go people, Maltese people, (not the dreadful foreigners who are meant to push up prices, or whatever else we find easy to blame foreigners for) are building, rehabilitating or restoring. There appears to be a building and a rebuilding frenzy going on.
You go down a street in say Zebbug, and you marvel at the amount of work that is going on, both in terms of maintenance and in terms of restoration.Our homes are not only our castles. Housing has become the main source of our national wealth, and it really merits a bit more serious work than one side good, other side bad, or yes to all development or no to any development, which is how polarised, stupid and downright childish the arguments for and against have become of late!
This tendency to overbuild is spilling over and affecting all areas of our lives. It’s affecting the economy because everyone wants to invest in housing. It’s affecting our health because there are obvious dangers resulting from the amount of building and excavation for more and more garages, which is making our air ever dustier. It also affects our tourism when you show potential tourists a picture of Paradise Bay on Christmas Day in Malta, rather than how the island really looks most of the year, almost as if the only buildings are the temples, and our fantastic heritage of the Knights of St John.
There really isn’t enough land for all our entrepreneurs left. That’s why it was great to read in the business newspapers this week that a Maltese consortium is building a large residential block in Bulgaria. The only way to satisfy our innate urge to build is actually to start developing much more abroad, and it looks like this is starting to happen as the economies of Eastern Europe open up in preparation for EU membership, or in their first years as EU members.
It is also very worrying that housing is such an important part of our economy today as we have no graduates in this area? There are a few housing modules in certain other courses at university but housing really merits a course to itself much as tourism studies does. We have a dearth of intelligent debate on housing. We have almost no professionals in this area. We have almost no research. And yet it is the motor of the economy.
No wonder we are resorting to name calling, labelling and polarisation of positions. Housing, and I don’t mean social housing, I mean the housing and building industry in general is a national concern as much as tourism is. It needs to be looked after, nurtured and nourished, so that we make the right decisions in this country’s interests. Instead of trying to understand and be creative in our solutions, we are in name calling and threatening not to vote mode. People’s anger is understandable but it is incumbent on us all to realise we are all part of the problem and need to be part of the solution together as well.
[email protected]