It was very irresponsible to approve the expected increase of 320 residences to the already over-saturated Paceville area.

The area just cannot take any more of anything. This government boasts it has “done” the roads in the area, by which it normally means tarting up the pavements and installing the upside down Love monument down at Spinola Bay.

But as anyone knows, the whole area is one big congestion – not the only one in Malta but perhaps the most recent and the one that could have been avoided had we any planning sense. As it is, Valletta is constrained by its geography and Sliema by the way it was built and never improved (although the upcoming Tigne nightmare could have been avoided had, for instance, the road in the new development been made wider and less dangerous).

But while we hummed and hawed, Paceville turned from a rather sleepy village of ordinary houses into Malta’s Golden Mile amid a plethora of development works that have gouged out the ordinary buildings and turned them into goldmines. That, in itself, does not account for the general tattiness of the area, but yes, the get-rich-quick legion is alive and very present there and makes its money from, among other things, property deals.

And while governments came and went and did up some road or another, usually the same one its predecessor had done, none ever thought to increase traffic viability by means of wider and more accessible roads. Nor by providing better parking.

As a result, more and more buildings are being pulled down, more high-rises are on the way. The Pender Place development follows in the wake of the Hilton development and more, undoubtedly, will follow.

Whether this, and the increase of other building stock will one day be occupied and used, never seems to exercise the minds of those who govern us or those who issue permits. Nor whether this will all lead to a huge bubble that one day will burst over all of us.

The irresponsibility must be shared by more than just the MEPA board, which approved the Pender Place outline development – society first for never seriously considering the impact of so much building nor the impact of continuing to increase population density; then the government for allowing any and all development to take place and only following through with infrastructural works after, thus going about things the other way from the rest of the world.

Consider just parking for a moment. We used to think it was the government’s responsibility to provide parking and, in fact, the government had promised no less than three parking spaces for the area. Now, no longer, it seems. There have been three private developments that have included parking, so the most the government can promise now is a Park & Ride scheme from far-away Pembroke (at the MEPA board meeting one even suggested using the Blata l-Bajda Park & Ride scheme for Paceville!). And the MEPA board, without a whimper, allowed the developer, in conjunction with some exasperated residents, to blithely do away with two levels of underground parking that had been part of the Development Brief of the Pender Place development.

It is not MEPA’s nor its board’s responsibility to plan ahead or to take drastic decisions. Properly speaking, that responsibility devolves upon each and every one of us, if only we can see where we are heading. And it naturally devolves upon the successive governments of the time.

But the same MEPA board meeting that approved the Pender Place development had, without knowing it, experienced the way the government puts it there to provide a rubberstamp of what is decided elsewhere.

That same morning, the MEPA board approved the relocation of the Qajjenza gas tanks to the Freeport – in itself a very important and long-due decision given a previous government’s criminal irresponsibility in allowing building development to take place next door to the gas depot.

But one wonders, for instance, why the MEPA board was not fully appraised of the care and responsibility which went into the decision – neither the negotiations with the EU nor the fact that for the second time in Maltese history Cabinet issued an insurance policy in the admittedly very rare occurrence of a tragedy involving the new gas depot which lies right in the flight path of planes coming in to land at Malta International Airport.

Admittedly, the MEPA board was going to vote Yes in any case, but why wasn’t it told, at least during the public meeting?