Malta Chamber wants law allowing State to repurpose stalled developments

From the honey-coloured streets of Valletta to the ever-expanding skyline of St Julian’s, Malta has always been a place where old stone and fresh concrete jostle for space. Yet in the past decade the building boom has left more than just cranes on the horizon; it has littered the islands with half-finished shells—ghosts of apartments, hotels and commercial blocks—whose scaffolding now rusts like a metallic reef above our terraced roofs. This week the Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry stepped into the fray with a bold proposal: a legal mechanism that would allow the State to step in and repurpose stalled developments “in the national interest”.

Speaking to HOT MALTA after the Chamber’s spring economic briefing, president Marisa Xuereb argued that idle sites are not only eyesores but economic deadweight. “Every scaffolded façade is a lost opportunity for housing, green space, or community infrastructure,” she said. “We need a law that balances private property rights with the urgent social contract we have to our citizens.” The Chamber’s policy paper, obtained by this newsroom, suggests a fast-track process whereby the Lands Authority could issue compulsory temporary leases on dormant projects after 24 months of proven inactivity. Developers would retain ownership but lose day-to-day control; meanwhile, NGOs, local councils or public-private partnerships could convert the skeletons into affordable homes, urban gardens, artists’ studios or even pop-up health clinics.

The backdrop is impossible to ignore. According to the Planning Authority, 42 major permits—covering more than 480,000 square metres—have expired without a single brick laid since 2019. Drive along the Sliema front at dusk and the silhouette of a 12-storey hotel-to-be on Tower Road stands hollow, its glassless windows reflecting nothing but the Mediterranean sunset locals once enjoyed unobstructed. In Gozo, the half-built “eco-resort” overlooking Ramla Bay has become a cautionary tale for farmers whose water tables dropped during excavation and never recovered.

Culturally, the proposal touches a raw Maltese nerve: our complicated relationship with home. The word “dar” carries the weight of generations; it is both physical shelter and inherited identity. When construction screeches to a halt, it is not just investment that freezes but the collective dream of what Malta should look like. “We grew up playing football in the street, not staring at concrete carcasses,” says 68-year-old Ninu Borg from Birkirkara, whose balcony now faces a stalled block of flats. “If government can turn that site into a neighbourhood garden, it would give us back a piece of the sky.”

Youth activist group Moviment Graffitti immediately welcomed the Chamber’s stance, calling it “a rare moment when business and civil society align against speculative greed”. Yet developers are wary. Sandro Chetcuti, CEO of the Malta Developers Association, warned that “changing the rules mid-game” could spook foreign investors already jittery after the grey-listing scare. “Contracts must be respected,” he insisted. “We are open to dialogue, but expropriation is a dangerous word.”

Local councils, caught in the middle, see practical upside. St Paul’s Bay mayor Alfred Grima says his seaside town has three dormant high-rise projects that could be reimagined as flood-proof public parking and coastal green buffers ahead of winter storm surges. “We have 15,000 residents in apartments built in the 1970s with no lifts,” Grima notes. “If we can retrofit stalled upper floors into elderly-friendly units, everyone wins.”

The Chamber’s proposal borrows from European models: Barcelona’s “right-to-use” law repurposes bankrupt sites into cooperative housing, while Rotterdam temporarily converts idle offices into student dorms. Malta’s twist is rooted in scale; we are 316 km² of rock where every vacant lot is someone’s view, someone’s heritage, someone’s pension plan. The draft legislation would include sunset clauses—sites revert to original owners once the market revives—and compensation pegged to the Consumer Price Index to avoid windfall losses.

Parliamentary secretary for planning Chris Agius told HOT MALTA that the government is “studying the proposal seriously” and plans to launch a public consultation before summer recess. If adopted, the law could break ground as early as 2025, potentially turning Malta’s concrete scars into bridges between our storied past and an inclusive future. Until then, the cranes will keep swaying above our rooftops, waiting for the winds of change—or at least the next planning permit.