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At some point (surely around the $1 million mark, if not before) building traditional Bermuda houses stops being quaint and starts being absolutely crippling for ordinary Bermudians.

The traditional Bermuda house is part of our heritage and ought to be preserved.

But our heritage cannot possibly be preserved if our country becomes so extraordinarily wealthy, and so extraordinarily expensive, that ordinary Bermudians cannot afford to live ordinary lives here.

It is hard to measure the effect on real estate and rent prices that international business has had.

But it’s clear that this wealth, along with laws and policies meant for a different time and different circumstances, has helped encourage a kind of upmarket suburban sprawl.

This sprawl has eaten up rare green space, pushed up rents and house prices, and helped create a Bermuda in which the average Bermudian feels decidedly out of place.

It’s a complex problem with few easy answers.

But one of the solutions, surely, is to build more apartment buildings in the city of Hamilton.

Building apartments is probably our only hope of significantly reducing the cost of building housing units for Bermudians.

Thirty identical doors, thirty identical sets of windows, thirty identical floor plans, all under one small roof…this is the kind of efficiency that can make homes affordable for people with ordinary jobs.

If this building takes place in Hamilton, it won’t look out of place or detract from the island’s traditional architecture.

In fact, it would improve the island’s appearance by reducing the need to build outside the city. We would be housing far more people, while using up far less land.

And it would improve the city itself, by adding badly-needed residents who will help its economy and enliven its atmosphere.

Each of these residents, of course, would represent one less commuter clogging the roads leading into Hamilton.

It would be smart, too, to encourage international business and other employers of non-Bermudian workers to house their staff in city apartments.

We should encourage them to build their own apartments or buy their own condominiums for their employees to live in.

Right now they aren’t allowed to do this, under policies designed to ensure that Bermudians and not foreigners own Bermuda’s land.

But these policies also ensure that international companies rent houses around the island at extraordinarily inflated prices.

This helps pump up the price of rents in Bermuda, leads to additional building throughout the island, and guarantees that international company employees aid Bermudians in clogging all roads into town every morning.

How is that helping Bermudians?

If international companies were allowed to build or own their own apartments in Hamilton, you can bet they would do it.

And once they had their own stock of apartments in Hamilton, you can bet they’d be a lot less willing to give huge rental allowances for large houses up and down the country.

They’d want to make sure their apartments are occupied.

So they’d be adding to the housing stock of Bermuda, in an area where it will do the most good and the least harm.

They’d be reducing rush hour traffic.

They’d be helping to make Hamilton a livelier and better city for all of us.

It would be important, of course, to restrict international companies to owning apartments in Hamilton.

And we don’t want international insurance companies becoming developers and landlords for anyone but their own staff: They should be required to rent them out only to their own employees.

If they reduced the size of their staff or pulled out of Bermuda, they should be required to sell their apartments to another international company to use for its employees, or sell them to Bermudians.

Either way, Bermuda gains.

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