Evicted at 92: How Malta’s Property Boom Is Tearing Families From Their Homes

The Right to the Roof Over Our Heads: When Maltese Property Law Meets the Human Heart
By Hot Malta

On a narrow Sliema side-street, a 92-year-old woman named Maria* still hangs her washing from the same limestone balcony her mother used in 1948. Across the closed wooden door, a freshly printed court notice declares that the apartment was sold at auction last month to settle a family debt. Maria has 30 days to leave the only home she has ever known.

Her story is not an exception; it is the latest tremor in a decades-old fault-line running beneath Malta’s sun-baked streets: the collision between the sacrosanct Maltese right to private property and the increasingly fragile right to a stable, dignified home.

### A Cultural Paradox

Malta’s Constitution guarantees both. Article 37(1) protects “the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions,” while Article 37(2) obliges the State to “promote the right to adequate housing.” Politicians love to quote both clauses in the same breath, but in practice they can pull in opposite directions.

The conflict is sharpened by Maltese history. For centuries, land was the only hedge against poverty; owning even one room in Valletta was a passport out of subsistence. That cultural memory still shapes us. Ask a Maltese grandmother why she never throws away a spare wardrobe and you’ll hear echoes of wartime displacement. Property is security; property is identity.

Yet the same reverence for bricks and title deeds can turn brutal when the market overheats. With foreign buyers paying cash above asking price and short-lets swallowing entire village cores, the Maltese home has become both fortress and commodity.

### The Courts, the Streets, the Stories

Between 2019 and 2023, eviction cases filed in Malta’s Civil Court rose by 47 %. Fewer than 9 % involved squatters; the majority were owners or heirs forced out by debt, family disputes or developers enforcing emphyteutical agreements signed in the 1970s.

Last October in Qormi, siblings Joseph and Graziella Camilleri chained themselves to their front door after a €1.8 million court judgment awarded their ancestral townhouse to a creditor. The live-streamed protest drew 30,000 viewers and triggered a spontaneous candlelight vigil. Two weeks later, a benefactor paid the debt—but only after the siblings agreed to sign over the roof terrace. The deal saved the façade but carved the house in half, a literal split between property rights and home.

### Community Fallout

Evictions ripple outward like diesel on harbour water. When a long-term tenant is removed from a Gozitan farmhouse so it can be converted into an Airbnb, the village grocer loses daily bread sales; the festa band loses a trumpet player; the parish priest loses a faithful usher.

Youth groups warn that the “brain drain” is not only about salaries but about precarious housing. A 28-year-old nurse recently told me she turned down a permanent post at Mater Dei because she couldn’t find a rental she could afford without sharing a bedroom. “In Malta, even a good job doesn’t guarantee a roof,” she said.

### Policy Crossroads

The government’s new White Paper on rent reform proposes longer eviction notice periods and a national landlord register, but it stops short of rent caps or compulsory purchase powers. NGOs argue Malta needs a constitutional amendment that explicitly recognises the “right to one’s home,” giving courts power to balance it against purely economic claims.

Opponents fear such a move would spook investors and dent Malta’s reputation as a safe place to park capital. Yet Maria’s balcony suggests a different calculus: if the soul of the islands is sold piecemeal, what exactly are we protecting?

### Conclusion

For most Maltese, the home is more than square metres; it is the stage on which first steps, last rites and every village feast in between are performed. When that stage can be repossessed at the bang of a gavel, the theatre of Maltese life itself is dimmed.

The coming months will test whether our legal system can evolve fast enough to keep families like Maria’s rooted without choking the dynamism that keeps the economy humming. One thing is clear: until we resolve the tension between property as investment and home as sanctuary, the washing will still hang on the balcony—but the woman who hung it may no longer be there.

*Name changed for privacy