In an interview with NET TV, the PN leadership candidate, Alex Borg, said that young people being priced out of the property market, and unable even to afford rent, is the most pressing issue today. He also decried what he described as excessive development without planning.
Alex Borg is right and there is some progress in having a major political figure recognise these facts. However, Alex Borg has no ideas nor any solution on how to address this surmounting and existential problem to our social fabric. In fact, when he proposed solutions for this problem in another interview, he only proposed tax incentives for first-time buyers which are very similar to the ones being offered today by the Labour government.
Alex Borg lacks the experience and the maturity to become a statesman. He has no plan or alternative vision for the country and he is too young and inexperienced to come up a distinctive vision that would pit him as an alternative to Labour.
Here’s Aex Borg’s major problem. In order to address the housing issue in Malta, the government needs to ensure that the supply of affordable domiciles available for sale is large enough to put downward pressure on housing prices – this would disrupt the construction industry which has become addicted to turning every real-estate in Malta into luxury property. It would also hurt all of those who are currently over-leveraged on property investments with the banks incurring some bad mortgage risk and potentially even some liquidations. Alex Borg is not going to do this. He is going to add more fuel to the fire by adding tax incentives. In addition, I don’t think that Alex Borg is actually aware that property prices only risk going even more upward once interest rates start to go down aggressively once again.
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