WHEN Housing Minister Ashfield DeVent announced that Government is formulating long-term plans to come to grips with Bermuda's housing problems his comments doubtless inspired hope among a great number of people that at last a panacea is being developed to cure this festering social wound.

The pessimists among us, however, will continue to entertain doubts as to whether Bermuda will ever come to grips with its housing problem.

For as long as we continue to expand and broaden our economy beyond the ability of this country to produce home-grown workers for all of the jobs we create, Bermuda will need to import labour. And as long as we bring in guest workers, it's axiomatic that Bermuda will always have a housing problem.

What seems to have prompted the Minister's comments is a dawning realisation in Government circles that Bermuda can no longer cope with all of the consequences of a superheated economy on the island's tiny infrastructure. It's not just housing that's in crisis. The roads are suffering from the transportation equivalent to arteriosclerosis, as clogged with traffic as a junk food addict's arteries are with fat.

There is increasing pressure for places in schools. What little remains of our open spaces are being subdivided and condominiumised at an ever accelerating rate, producing yet more obscenely priced housing for yet more foreigners with no thought given to where the Bermudian workers who build these developments will be able to afford to live.

I guess Bermuda's first brush with what would become a housing problem is when the Americans first opened their military installations on the island during World War Two and servicemen and their families began to live off base. This situation proved to be a boon for those landlords who were in a position to lease houses to their new American tenants while the former Bermudian tenants discovered to their horror that a whole category of houses was no longer available for rent to locals.

Still, most of the rental units leased by the military and their dependents were located near the bases in St. George's and Southampton, leaving housing in all of the other areas of Bermuda free to be rented to Bermudians.

But the pressure on Bermuda's housing stock would really only become something that we could call a crisis when we began to import large numbers of foreign workers in the 1960s and '70s who, of course, needed somewhere to live when they arrived here.

the same time potential home owners began to consider adding apartments to their newly acquired homes as a means of helping them pay off mortgages. The apartments were rented to both Bermudians and the newly arrived guest workers, leaving the private sector to essentially provide for Bermuda's housing needs from that point onwards.

Some home builders even converted their properties into apartment complexes given the investment opportunities that the Bermuda rental market provided. Over the years the addition of apartments to private homes has come to be considered the norm in Bermuda, despite the fact that whenever Government built new public housing projects the addition or rental of apartments was not an option for the new low-income owners ? those who could have benefited most from the booming market.

Banking practices and the ability to obtain a mortgage have no doubt factored into the development of Bermuda's unique housing development pattern since the 1970s and is a situation that has sometimes prompted conflict.

Landlords are often pitted against tenants on the basis of rents, property owners believing they should not be subjected to Government restrictions. On the other hand Government has attempted to assist tenants by making available rental subsidies. While not everyone is in this programme, the Government bill for its subsidy programme must now run to hundreds of thousands of dollars every month.

It is often asked why Government, with its own stock of housing, seems to be intent on competing with the private sector. Why provide rental subsidies when the same money could go into more low-cost housing and provide those in the most need with permanent homes?

No one has ever answered this question. But presumably Government is aware that its subsidies are used by many landlords to pay back their mortgages. Should the subsidies stop and that money be invested in more public housing projects, there would certainly be a domino effect throughout the Bermudian economy.

Private home-owners who depend on rental income from Bermudian tenants who receive Government rental subsidies would suddenly find the banks foreclosing on their properties. There would be catastrophic consequences and Government would be unwilling to pay the political price at the next General Election.

In my view Housing Minister DeVent is likely to continue to follow a policy of building some public housing and subsidising rents. I do not believe there will be any dramatic shifts in policy because I do not believe this Government ? or any Government, for that matter ? is willing to face up to the dilemma that is confronting Bermuda.

We are a small country with a finite land area. Yet we have a very developed economy that produces more jobs than we will ever have the capacity to fill. So what is the solution? Since it is abundantly clear that we have more people in the country than we have the ability to comfortably absorb, should we not be thinking in terms of taking the economy off the boil? Slowing its development to a more manageable rate?

A smaller economy would mean we would have less need to bring in imported labour. But it would also, of course, mean a commensurate lowering of our standard of living. And that is something that no Government, not even a Progressive Labour Party Government, would be prepared to contemplate.

It's the ultimate Catch-22 situation. A great deal of our socio-economic problems would be solved if we had a smaller economy but we dare not consider the financial price we would have to pay.

I wish Housing Minister Ashfield DeVent luck in his efforts to come to grips with our current crisis with housing. But he will need more than luck to finally solve this longstanding problem.