“Teach a parrot to say ‘supply and demand’ and you’ve made an economist out of him!” The famous dictum by Thomas Carlyle (former rector of Edinburgh University, among so many other attributes) springs ever so easily to mind whenever I read many of the pronouncements of operators in the building sector, be they speculators, builders, estate agents, planners, architects or just plain cowboys. They will just blabber the words “supply and demand” and expect everybody to bow their heads and blindly accept their positions.

 And the leitmotif  of their clamouring comes out large and strong. The free market (in property development and operations) must be allowed to function without anyone’s intervention. Implying: government, politicians, civil society, the media, church, public opinionists, etc. ‘You lot just shut up because it is us (who play/work in this sector) who know what’s good for everyone involved!’ The funny thing is that very often, along with such positions/assertions, there then escape words (famous Freudian slips?) such as: “The real estate industry as a whole is desperately awaiting long-promised regulation to enforce ethical standards of professional behaviour”.

All those engaged in the development and real estate sector badly need to be much clearer, and specific, and morally inspired, when they speak of “regulation”.

Do they or don’t they know that this is a word pregnant with implications? Are they possibly using the word only in the usual lobbying context of regulatory capture where they want regulation which only pleases the sellers or rentiers of property; that is regulation which, for example, allows them to claw prices out of thin air and then flog them on to the market simply because, for them and their ilk, a chunky part of that market may be comfortable enough (or indeed more often forced!) to pay whatever is asked from it.

And then to hell, for example, with locals who simply cannot keep up with the foreign players on the market. Not for them is there any acceptance that rents asked should never exceed a certain percentage of a worker’s assured income.

Many of those who want a totally non-interventionist state in this sector clearly come over as being ready to accept a situation where estate agents and developers are, on the altar of the so-called ‘free market’, allowed full free reign to charge whatever rentals they want. In the process, they drive overall national levels of rents ever higher and higher… and then just saddle the government of the day with having to (from taxpayers’ money) vote an ever bigger and bigger budget for rental subsidies and provision of social housing.

Woe betide us all if government had to fall for this type of lobbying

This is classism of the worst kind imaginable. It doesn’t care two hoots about the inevitable subdividing of societies and residential areas and communities into ‘elite’, ‘hoi-polloi’, ‘foreign residential’, ‘high value’, and then ‘the rest’. It is a stance that often unconsciously betrays itself in the way that such people often speak in terms of two things, ‘social (what diabolical usage of the term!) housing’ and ‘private housing’! Plus of course that it is a stance that doesn’t give two hoots about soundly managed public finances!

Out of respect to the particular writer, I will not mention the name of the author of a published contribution where in one part of what he wrote he said “... introducing regulation in the property rental market would be contradictory, especially in view of the government’s incentives”.

Woe betide us all if government had to fall for this type of lobbying. Over a term, such a government would be condemning itself to a type of society that avoids all sorts of popular pressure on how subsidies are spent, and in the process also simply ignores public finance impacts.

Thankfully, government has not fallen for it and is suggesting that it will not allow non-affordability of decent housing for Maltese workers to continue to be a hallmark of our society’s poor.

If any government simply accepts blindly that the real estate and/or building development industries are just economic activities where it (the government) should simply be a totally passive viewer, only – if at all – being present when it is obliged to write subsidy cheques, then that government would be condemning itself to a quick popular backlash, especially so in a country of Malta’s size.

There is at this point in time already a very large number of workers and families who are being squeezed into poverty and penury simply because owners of rental property are, in simply uncontrolled manners, freely pushing up their rental demands in whatever way and rate they choose. This is precisely the juncture where all simplistic talk about ‘the free market’ and ‘supply and demand’ should be thrown out of the window.

Succumbing to that sector’s ever greedier and unchristian demands can be a very easy form of political suicide… simple Christianity requires, yes, that that category, irrespective of what they say, and who they may be, should be confronted head on, onthe altar of civil debate and, much more important, by legislative action.

Now that the new rental law is in force, and that brave affordable housing projects have been announced by the government, we can expect them to very quickly start being peddled in the media, in the socialcircuits, and on the ever so easy to manipulate public grapevines with pronouncements such as: “this is not working”, “this is killing the golden goose” etc.

The government will do well to expect those sooner or later and simply resist, ignore, and press on; as Dante would have it: “non ti curar di loro ma guarda e passa…”

Dr John Consiglio teaches in the Faculty of Economics, Management and Accountancy of the University of Malta.