The condominium society
As independent Malta approaches 60, our attention is taken up by whether the country can last another 60 years. The place seems to have been taken over by bandits and many wonder if national cohesion can survive the impact of the demographic change marked by labour immigration from third countries in the last decade.
This demographic shift justifies the attention it’s getting. However, another shift is taking place by stealth. As more houses are knocked down, and flats go up instead, more of us are becoming members of a condominium. The immediate impact is social and environmental but I suggest there will be a longterm political impact.
Why? Because the experience of being a condominium owner is like a crash course in modern political thought – from Machiavelli to the rule-of-law liberals and common-good communitarians of our day.
What condominium owners learn to fear and to demand may well affect their future expectations of our politicians.
Buying a flat involves buying a share of a common area whose upkeep requires a pooling of responsibility and costs. It often means that complete strangers have to build a way of getting along to protect their peace of mind and property value.
In practice, what started out as a private commercial act – buying a flat – ends up being a political education. A condominium is more like a polity than a firm. An employer can sack a misbehaving employee; a troublesome shareholder can be bought out. But condominium owners are more like politicians who have to live with opposition.
Owners have to deal with classic political problems. Enforcement of rules, when the scope for coercion is limited. Free riders, who expect others to pay for their benefits. The problem of the commons, or,
how to prevent a common resource from being depleted while still being able to use it. The problem of externalities, or, how private enjoyment might inflict costs on others.
Above all, there is the key point of reference: the contract signed on becoming a member. Backed by law, it imposes obligations and duties. It governs how voting rights can be lost. It’s perhaps the closest real thing to the social contract discussed by political theorists.
Over time, owners learn how to behave politically (even if they don’t quite put it that way). They acquire a better sense of their rights. They learn how to build
alliances and how to read a budget and evaluate it from their point of view. They demand value for money and better communication.
The condominium landscape is hardly uniform. A condominium can range from a dozen flats to several dozen. It can be a single block of flats with a common area that does not require complex administration; it can be several blocks sharing a pool and garden, sometimes with extensive grounds, requiring professional precincts management. It can be new, with the teething problems of a new property, or old, requiring overhaul, or something in between.
In this, condominiums resemble the plurality of political experience. But, over time, the experiences begin to overlap. All new condominiums eventually require overhaul.
There is variety in the forms of management, too. There are self-managed and professionally managed condominiums. The management companies themselves can be small, unable to handle more than maintenance of simple properties, to middle-range companies handling hundreds of apartments, to large ones in charge of thousands of properties.
However, there is a constant. A look at the yellow pages might amaze you with the sheer number of professional administration companies advertising their services. The supply is growing to meet rising demand.
I am told, by people with experience in the sector, that condominiums often experience several cycles of discontent, spurred by conflict to move from self-management to professional administration, and then changing firms two or three times until equilibrium is reached, where expectations become realistic, service is competent and freeriding is tamed.
Conflict – or, rather, its management – is an education, too. It requires facing up to problems and constructive debate and compromise. It calls for an assertion of rights. It wouldn’t be sustained if people didn’t have a vivid sense of having a stake in the consequences.
Whereas many taxpayers behave as though it’s not their money that’s being spent by the government and accept handouts as though they were gifts, condominium owners never forget a professional administrator works for them and can be fired.
And many administrators are upping their game, making use of digital technologies to make all the information concerning their work – from budgets to tasks to meetings and decisions – accessible online.
If this experience of local administration continues to spread, in two or three electoral cycles we shall have a significant segment of the population that lives in (and perhaps was even raised in) condominiums. Such people will have come to expect participation in the management of their affairs; value for their money; freedom of information on what is being done in their name; and, above all, that the administrators are not their masters but their servants.
It would be astounding if this domestic experience does not spill over into expectations of how their country is run by politicians.
If I’m right, there are many votes to be won by the political party that offers a programme to reform government that meets the expectations of the condominium society. The next 60 hold promise, not just disappointment. Out of the rubble of knocked-down houses may sprout the green shoots of political reform.
Out of the rubble of knocked-down houses may sprout the green shoots of political reform