Editorial

The National Statistics Office has reported that most dwellings in this country are occupied by their owners, thus confirming what everybody suspected.

Despite amendments to the rent law, most owners still fear to rent out their property to Maltese citizens, with the result that few young people planning to set up their own home even dream of renting one. In fact, a Housing Authority scheme aimed at encouraging landlords to rent vacant dwellings drew no applications over the past year. The aim of the scheme was to encourage the use of vacant buildings, thus helping to ease demand for new building.

The great gainers have been building contractors and the banks, which by now have thousands of people in their thrall. Few young couples manage to reach middle age knowing they have thrown off their debt to a bank.

Another unpleasant consequence of this reluctance to have tenants is that thousands of buildings, old and relatively new, have been empty for years, while new buildings go up all the time, eroding more and more of our already greatly diminished countryside.

The Housing Authority has been doing good work in providing well built and economically priced housing, much of which is let. Incentives must be provided to private owners to persuade them make their property more often available to people who cannot afford to burden themselves with mortgages.

Too many of our apartment blocks and terraced houses are dreary to look at, but at least most of the dwellings built in the past four decades are reasonably comfortable.

In a number of new developments, a good effort is being made to instil a sense of harmony in the housing units built but who is monitoring such developments to ensure that the owners themselves do not mar such harmony - not necessarily through illegal extensions?

Most dwellings today have at least two bedrooms, practically all have a bathroom, and close on half have a spare toilet. Amazingly, terraced houses have an average of 10.3 rooms and flats an average of 7.5 rooms.

While a good many terraced houses or flats must surely have fewer rooms than these averages, there is little doubt that many of our dwellings - and these do not include a good many (nearly 12,000) luxuriously proportioned detached or semi-detached houses - provide generous accommodation and take up much space, terraced houses having an average area of 130 square metres.

Can we go on building indefinitely in this fashion? Are we not already well past the point where we had to see that the land we have was used as economically as possible?

The many dwellings built during the boom of the sixties and early seventies (nearly 20 per cent of all existing dwellings) are now middle-aged and more than a few of them are much the worse for wear.

While the ones that have worn well are now getting, or ought to be getting, a refurbishment, the many shoddily built ones should be candidates for demolition and replacement.

What Malta needs is for serious attention to be given to such an exercise rather than to the building of dwellings on previously unbuilt land. This, one hopes, is a matter now being seriously addressed by MEPA.