The Paceville master plan is a violent form of gentrification

Wednesday’s environment committee meeting inside Parliament degenerated into an embarrassing grilling of the handpicked experts, Mott MacDonald, who have been tasked by the PA to reimagine how the gritty streets of Paceville should look like once Malta’s richest property developers get the green light to build high-rise towers.

From White Rocks to Portomaso, Labour’s parlour is populated by cash-rich magnates who want to map out the country’s future only if it enriches them directly: high-rise, land reclamation, new special rules that override local plans, expropriations… this is no regeneration of Paceville, but a re-engineered enclave for high-rolling property buyers. The future is clear: an elite caste of consumer will fly in to make Paceville one of their global bases, and we will build their homes, we will bank their cash, and valet them to their hearts’ content.  

How we have come to this radical point is no real surprise. The ‘golden mile’ down at St George’s Bay has long been a fantasy of major hoteliers, because it was they who benefited from cheaper land prices in the first place when they were encouraged to notch up Malta’s tourism product.

It has been a constant philosophy of successive governments to prop up tourism entrepreneurs if they could generate more tourism exports. The Corinthia brand was dreamt up in 1969 with £400,000 government grant and 10-year tax holiday on construction imports; even in the 1990s, the Tumas Group was leased the land at the old Hilton in St Julian’s for €445,000 until 2114, before it was actually sold for a paltry €1.8 million in 2006. A penthouse at Portomaso is now on sale for €2.6 million.

The deleterious effects of partnering with insatiable developers has come at the cost of citizens, denied the protection of planning authorities too spineless to uphold the rules. The 1992 Tigné Point development brief originally was for a 300 residential unit project and a maximum four to six-floor height limit, but the Planning Authority simply approved gradual extensions over the years and by 2008 the apartment number had already gone beyond 500, and a 14-storey tower being completed now.

“You spend millions and this is the thanks you receive,” the late Albert Mizzi scoffed, referring to photos of Tigné Point from Valletta when in 2009 UNESCO warned the capital city could lose its World Heritage Status because of overdevelopment across the harbour. On that same issue, we had reported on the front page of MaltaToday, that the planning authority had invoiced Mizzi’s MIDI a €4.5 million fee for the disposal of construction waste at sea for the period between 2001 and 2006; but the government agreed to charge MIDI the same rate applying to waste deposited in landfills instead of the higher rate which applied to waste dumped at sea, earning MIDI a €3.3 million discount.

This is the story of Malta: a political class enamoured with big business, an indissoluble marriage lasting over 50 years.

Even in the grilling of the Mott MacDonald consultants in the environment committee on Wednesday, it was disheartening to see Franco Mercieca chair the committee: he only happens to be a 10% shareholder in Menfi Limited, together with developer Joseph Portelli, the developer behind the highest Paceville high-rise, Mercury House’s 34-storey Zaha Hadid creation.

It is clear that the end-game of the Paceville masterplan is a violent form of ‘gentrification’ that is centred around the airportification of Malta: hunting down the world’s high net worth individuals to make Malta another of their bases – for elite R’n’R, tax purposes, or real estate, or whatever; remove the organic hindrances inside Paceville, human life itself, with a €151 million expropriation of existing residents and commercial outlets; and create new public space and infrastructure that can satisfy the needs of the future Paceville resident.

The PA’s own nefariousness was laid bare when it kept secret a list of submissions by the owners of nine sites whose requests for high-rise towers were included in the master plan. On the other hand 25 submissions from residents, businessmen and environmental groups made in a public consultation were all published online. The €300,000 master plan, granted by direct order to Mott MacDonald, who happened to be engineering consultants to Portelli’s Mercury House project, had no regard for high-rise limits or public foreshore limits. It is a design simply catered to accommodate the whims of big business and real estate moguls.

Turning Paceville into a ‘prime coastal area’, a Mediterranean Miami/Dubai/Singapore, is not just a fantastic idea drawn up by planners at the PA and advisors in Castille. It is an extreme form of eviction of families and business owners who have lived and worked here for decades, a high cost for new infrastructure and public security to render ‘rowdy’ Paceville safer, and will result in a rapid property expansion that only newcomers will afford.