Community housing is being promoted as the new name for social housing in the UK, not least because of the negative connotations associated with the latter. When people think social housing many tend to think lower quality housing, and sadly, lower quality people.

However the boom in house prices both here and in the UK means that we are going full circle again with very many borderline middle class and truly middle class people being unable to access the home of their choice, and so they turn to the government for support.

After all, in both post war Malta and the UK, social housing was also for families we would today term middle class. Housing estates housed many people who today are heads of government departments or are successful civil servants, are teachers, social workers and small businessmen. Some of them also went on to become very successful indeed, and there is a body of thought that thinks they should no longer be able to enjoy that housing once their earning power is so high.

However that is fodder for another article. The point is that as long as the government subsidised housing for people with jobs, with career prospects and with families there was far less stigma attached to social housing than there undoubtedly is today.

But if you zoom forward to 2007 and see who is applying for social housing today, or who is desperately in need of it, you understand immediately that the social fabric is totally different in Malta today. Many have a lifetime of social problems ranging from abusive backgrounds to health problems. Many do not or cannot work. Many are part of unconventional families. Many, very many, are elderly and we don’t give them enough prominence and help.The point is that it is an entirely different social mix to the kind of people who applied for and got social housing 20 or 30 years ago, something which merits further study.

What baffles me in all this is where did the really poor and destitute go for housing 30 years ago? I find it amazing that with all our increased wealth, both here and in the UK there appear to be larger numbers than ever in need of decent community housing for rent or very low cost sale.

Perhaps many of the destitute were ignored then, so we still find many of them stuck in hovels called private sector rents, often uncomplaining but living in conditions most of us would not believe. Perhaps then we gave more prominence to the teacher than to the destitute 50-year-old whose husband had dumped her.

Obviously the taxpayer and landowners paid for massive housing estates, so the working class were housed, but very often quite well off people too, although in the standards of those days people were given large bits of land for free, or large homes for free, when far, far better use could have been made of the land available, especially when you think of the needs of today’s generation.

It’s easy to be wise after the event though. Thirty years ago over-housing people, or giving them access to often too large a plot for free was all we knew. But what we can all agree on now is that in the last 20 years the boom in our building industry has taken over from government provision, and many of the sort of people who were housed by the government practically for free in the past (not free of course to those whose land was taken from them to pay for this?) are now today housed by the private sector, aided by the banks with very easy access to loans, long years of debt and the like.

However price rises, particularly in the last three years, are starting to make ownership of the kind of home many young couples want out of reach. True, many of them have unrealistic or exaggerated expectations but I don’t think we can deny that many of them cannot afford what is there.

Some of these young couples who earn say Lm500 to Lm600 a month between them could actually rent somewhere reasonable for Lm100 to Lm150 per month (paying a quarter of your earnings on housing is considered normal in the EU) but the culture of owning, and particularly of owning after you marry, is so strong that people are just refusing to do that even though they can afford it.

Then there is another group who live on social security or the minimum wage who cannot afford any form of private rents at all, beyond of course the old protected ones.

So the government has a mammoth task ahead of it. Middle class people need housing. They can afford to rent but won’t. Working class people need affordable housing too, and can’t afford anything on offer, except through government provision.

Housing both here in Malta and in the UK used to have a significant percentage of GDP allocated to it. Today spending on both is nothing like what it was in percentage terms 30 years ago. Those days have gone thanks in part to building booms and bank loans. It may well have to come back though, whatever the colour of the administration

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