Family life around a table

In recent years the Housing Authority concentrated not only on trying to increase its output to match the ever growing demand but also to improve the quality of what it builds so that the units we rent or sell do not "look" too much like blocks of government housing. We have also resisted pressure to build more and cheaper by either drastically reducing our space standards or following the build 'em high policies of some of our European neighbours.

As a consequence we have few no-go housing estates as they do in Britain and the rest of Europe. A downturn is starting but we don't yet have housing estates where you can't write your address if you apply for a job because nobody would employ somebody coming from that neighbourhood. We have unemployment certainly but we do not have a whole swathe of disaffected youth cooped up in small units of nasty housing who will inevitably turn to the kind of criminal behaviour we saw in France lately.

Housing estates with 40 per cent unemployment and little employability are time bombs waiting to happen and, here too, it is important that when we design housing for lower income families we do as much as possible to enhance the sense of home, the pride in their place, the well being of a community. We perhaps fail to appreciate how much poorly built and designed housing can ruin lives, destroy families and put too much of a strain on communities. Just recently, a British policewoman was killed in a senseless attack that shocked her local community and provoked national outrage. Two of the killers were brought up in a terrible housing estate in North Kensington that I remember very well from my housing days in the UK.

One survivor of that housing estate recently wrote an excellent piece in the UK's Sunday Times on how young people could be prevented from turning to crime. He was brought up in the same housing estate as the policewoman's killers but largely, he says, due to the determination of his single parent mother, he managed to scrape into university and is now, among other things, working to improve the estates in which he was brought up.

Very bad policy mistakes were made in housing in the past all over Europe. It is very easy to just look at housing from an economic perspective and create the smallest possible units and the greatest possible numbers. It wins votes. It makes people instantly grateful. But policy-makers also have to consider what life would be like living as Shaun Bailey said, in a flat where "there is no room for a table", neither in the kitchen nor elsewhere.

He writes: "Most of the flats are built in such a way that nobody can sit around a table. Traditionally, a table is where a family has discussions, where parents give attitudes to their children. If children come home and parents are cooking them food, it establishes their dependency. That doesn't happen here. There is no room for a table. We all eat dinner off our laps. Families start not to eat together because there is no point. Many of the younger people I deal with have never spent any meaningful time with their mothers or their fathers. Their parents didn't do anything with them and they have no set of family rules that govern them".

But, no doubt, when that housing estate was opened, a minister beamed, people clapped, the press dutifully reported the availability of a large number of new houses. Few would have predicted that these areas would become time bombs waiting to explode in more ways than one.

Of course, Malta, with its limited land space, has particular constraints but we do have to be careful, not only in the area of social housing but in all affordable housing projects that we design for the future so that we do not create ugly ghettoes where few would want to live and which simply become the homes of a growing underclass.

A property price bubble isn't the only important issue. Building homes that enhance our communities is as solid an investment in our future as is imaginable.

Ms Micallef is chairman of the Housing Authority.