Page 5 - Housing & Poverty In Malta With A Focus On The Southern Harbour Region

3. Introduction & Literature Survey

Housing is in many respects sui generis, and this is more so in Malta where several
unstudied, ill-understood and understudied conundrums still exist. Although the strong
domestic construction industry lobby is well-positioned to ensure that several issues of
national importance that pose a threat to the represented interests never make it to the
policy discussions that matter, it is a well-known and widely-acknowledged fact that
housing and its various constituent parts have an intimate and inextricable relationship
with several factors affecting the well-being of the population at large. These issues
include, but are not limited to, issues such as the inexistence of a link between demand
and supply on the one hand, and prices on the other (and therefore the possible
competition policy and anticompetitive collusion implications thereof), the future effect
that this might have on health, tourism and the urban fabric of villages, towns and cities,
as well as the link between housing prices and modern-day poverty. It is generally
acknowledged, in this regard, that decent housing is a basic necessity for the healthy
psychosomatic development of an individual and yet, notwithstanding the lofty
proclamations of the Human Rights Charter, the universal right to housing is nowhere to
be found.

The term housing is itself ambiguous, despite the fact that its frequency in colloquial
usage might give a different impression. Housing could be thought of as an asset in terms
of the land space occupied and of which the value generally increases with time, unless a
prolonged recession is experienced (this happened, for instance, in the UK in the early
90’s and ended up with many households’ being doubly squeezed first through the
recession itself and secondly through negative equity). It is, at times, thought of as a

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