In Swieqi: ‘Should I grab a rifle and start shooting everyone?’

Nadia wakes up at around 8am on Sunday to find urine on her front door, a man passed out on the pavement, and vomit just a few metres away.

She grabs the mop, cleans up the mess, steps back inside, and makes her coffee.

For some Swieqi residents, this has become an ordinary morning routine in a once-quiet locality now at war with rats, vandalism, drunken tourists, and developers cashing in on short-let accommodation.

Nadia has also woken up to find that someone had defecated in her garden overnight, and she’s not the only one. George, another Swieqi resident, says he regularly finds urine, shit, or vomit on his doorstep in the morning. And sometimes, the morning surprise is not the mess, but people getting busy outside residents’ homes.

“I’ve never seen it myself, but I know it happens,” Sarah said. And she’s completely right. Last Saturday, MaltaToday received a video of a man masturbating in a car outside a Swieqi home, undeterred by the CCTV cameras pointed in his direction.

This has been going on for at least 10 years, and every resident will tell you the same thing—it is only getting worse.

“How are you doing, Noel?” I asked as we walk into his office at the Swieqi local council. Noel Muscat is the locality’s long-standing mayor and he is as frustrated and angry as the people he represents. “Wondering what the hell I’m still doing,” he replies.

I meet Muscat to discuss the problems facing Swieqi and he immediately hands me a report written by the council in 2016 and which was handed to then Tourism Minister Edward Zammit Lewis.

The report appears to foreshadow many of the issues the locality is facing today, including cleanliness, the regulation of apartment block administrators, and the need for MTA licences for short-let accommodation. And yet, nearly a decade after Muscat began chasing ministers for help, those pleas have yet to be answered.

A problem foretold

Residents feel unheard by the council, and the council feels unheard by the government. Meanwhile, the situation keeps snowballing into what George succinctly calls “hell on earth.”

“My family thought we were moving into a peaceful neighbourhood. That was our plan,” George tells me over the phone. “At the time, ERA used to joke that even the garbage smells good in Swieqi.”

Today, residents say up to 50 black bags of garbage can pile up outside massive apartment blocks used for short-let accommodation. While the buildings have cleaners, residents say waste is often taken out on the wrong day, while renters rarely separate it properly.

The law states that commercial buildings, including short-lets, are required to hire their own private contractors for garbage collection. However, none of them seem to do this, and no one with the power to stop them seems to care.

The mayor tells me the council had already realised garbage collection was becoming a problem back in 2016. A decade has gone by, and no help, or even an answer, has arrived. Now, Muscat says, Swieqi finds itself in a crisis that only gets worse in the summer months.

Short-lets are extremely popular in Swieqi since it finds itself only a 15-minute walk from Paceville, attracting a certain type of tourist attracted to Malta’s party reputation.

“I can take you to buildings which are hardly finished and still covered in dust from the construction. People will already be inside them,” the mayor says, explaining that these apartments are rarely empty for more than a day.

Since renters are constantly rotating, cleaners take out the garbage whenever they clean an apartment, which as Muscat notes, is almost every day. Sometimes cleaners take out the garbage just hours after it was supposed to be collected, leaving it to melt for another week in the sun.

Shit’s Creek

George mockingly describes this as “a rat, tourist, cockroach, and short-let infestation.”

The rotting garbage is a paradise for rats. On Facebook, some residents have dubbed their neighbourhood ‘Shit’s Creek.’ So, what do residents do in this situation?

Sarah decided to take matters into her own hands and contact the landlords directly.

“They tell me they can do whatever they want on private property. Then, they block me,” she says. “I’m blocked by three apartment managers because I asked them politely to clean up their garbage.”

Ironically, just minutes before we speak on the phone, Sarah tells me she was shoved by a construction worker after asking him to pick up the garbage he had left on the side of the road. As a tender goodbye, he told her to go “fuck herself”.

It’s safe to say, the DIY tactic failed.

Sarah says these incidents happen over and over again in the exact same locations. Every resident MaltaToday speaks to points to one site in particular—a large apartment complex owned by Bilom, Swieqi’s favourite neighbourhood developer, which they believe is being used largely for short-let accommodation.

And yet, somehow, it seems to me that garbage is the least of Swieqi’s problems.

Balcony parties

The tourists and students staying in these apartments are often in Malta for a week-long bender. And where better to party than an unregulated apartment block next to Paceville, with no hotel staff, no reception desk, and no one responsible when the party goes too far?

According to residents, entire blocks host balcony parties, with some renters even jumping from one balcony to another to join the next one.

I will admit that planning law is not my area of expertise, but Muscat’s explanation is simple. Short-lets, he argues, operate through a planning loophole.

Normally, if someone wants to open a business from a residential property, they would need permission from the Planning Authority to change the use of that property from residential to commercial. But short-let operators, Muscat says, do not need such a planning permit.

Instead, all they need to really cash-in on their massive apartment blocks is an MTA licence. Muscat points out that this is a tourism licence, not a planning one.

That distinction matters. Muscat insists that short-lets are businesses in the same way hotels are, except hotels are subject to rules that short-let apartments can avoid.

“At least hotels have security or a front desk,” he says. “There are rules they have to follow.”

It gets worse when considering that Swieqi is almost entirely a priority residential area, where commercial activity is not meant to take over residential streets.

And yet, short-let accommodation has allowed developers to make money from tourist accommodation in a town that was supposed to be a home.

Collateral damage

“Developers don’t care about the people who have lived in Swieqi for their entire lives,” Nadia remarks. “They don’t care about families who have invested into their homes. They don’t care about the sick or the elderly who cannot sleep at night.”

George puts it best: “Landlords don’t give a fuck about residents. Most of them live abroad or in some villa in Madliena. We are collateral damage.”

Residents say the partying goes on all night, and this is not some cosy get-together with a glass of wine and Love Island on TV.

It is music blasting through closed double-glazed windows, glass bottles flying out of windows, and grown men standing completely naked on their balconies, “showing off their family jewels,” as Nadia puts it, while your children watch from their bedroom windows.

George tells me his mental health has seriously suffered after going months without getting more than two to three hours of sleep, barely able to recall the last time he has slept throughout the night.

“Someone’s really going to lose their marbles someday,” Nadia says. “I hope the authorities see this; we need help.”

Sarah, who also can’t sleep, tells me it’s not rare to find someone passed out on the pavement after a night of heavy drinking. Residents also increasingly believe drugs are becoming a serious problem in the area.

Tone-deaf minister

On 12 May, the Labour Party promised to introduce on-the-spot fines by 1 June to deal with the countless reports of rowdy tourists who have no ties to the country, and therefore little reason to fear the legal system. I remember having to write a report about it.

The proposed legislation would require anyone who does not hold residence in Malta, including tourists, to pay on-the-spot fines for breaking the law while in the country, with officers collecting immediate electronic payment. Swieqi residents welcomed the proposal.

“Then, they called an election,” Muscat tells me. “It’s like there’s a vacuum for the next month. Everything you worked on before is forgotten. It all stops.”

When 1 June came and went with no law in place, one resident, Paul, reached out to newly appointed Home Affairs Minister Glenn Bedingfield to ask about the progress made on the much-anticipated measure.

“There’s no government and no parliament,” was Bedingfield’s legally correct but tone-deaf response.

Muscat says the Swieqi council immediately reached out to the relevant ministers after the new Cabinet was announced. “We never heard back. Not even to tell us that our email was noted.”

If it makes the mayor feel any better, the Home Affairs Ministry did not reply to MaltaToday either when asked for comment. In any case, July has arrived, and the legislation has yet to be presented in parliament.

“I can’t understand why authorities won’t take this step. It’s a win-win, they make their money and we get to sleep at night,” Nadia says. “What’s stopping them?” I think that’s an amazing question.

Victims becoming criminals

Nadia used to go on walks down to Sliema and St Julian’s as the sun rose over the sea early in the morning. “It was lovely,” she reminisces, her voice softening for a few moments. When she was younger, Nadia used to take that same road at those same hours as she walked home alone from Paceville.

“I can’t do that anymore,” she says. “I can’t even stand outside with my children anymore because people harass me, and you never know how far that harassment will go.”

George says residents are living in fear of constant provocation and threats. He recalls one case where a resident had to pay €3,000 in damages after a group of men allegedly decided to use the roof of her car as a trampoline. Street signs have been physically ripped out of the ground, he adds.

“Landlords have to be held responsible, the fines can’t just go to tourists,” George says. “We don’t want to remove the web, we want to kill the spider, and the spider is short-lets.”

“My daughters park illegally because they are scared to walk home. Every time my wife goes to the gym, I can hear them whistling and calling to her. What am I supposed to do? Grab a rifle and start shooting at all of them? Make sure you write this down: The victims can quickly become the criminals. Is this what my country wants?”