Spinola Bay is a tourist hub with plenty of real estate agencies and no retail shops.

Essential retail services, such as stationery shops, household goods stores and shops selling domestic appliance are non-existent in this neighbourhood

You have to go out of your way to find the Times of Malta or to buy some envelopes.

The retail scene at St Julian’s is abysmal.

In the last 15 years or so, the few retail shops we had in the Spinola Bay area have all been replaced by real estate agencies. There used to be a Cassar and Cooper travel agency, a dry-cleaning shop, a beauty salon, a souvenir shop, a home furnishings store and two small gift shops next to each other.

A unique gift shop on St George’s Road was turned into a tattoo parlour and then into a foot-massage outlet. A hardware store on the same road was taken over by an overpriced mini-market that caters for tourists and a restaurant kitchen at Spinola Bay was transformed into a real estate agency, next door to yet another real estate firm.

In a short stretch of road along Spinola Bay, there are no fewer than 13 real estate firms competing fiercely against each other.

The same applies to the stretch of road facing the Sliema promenade. There are several real estate firms and financial institutions but hardly a retail shop in sight.

Without shops, and the customers who frequent them, the promenade in winter looks desolate and forlorn.

This ‘wasteland’ along the Sliema front is due to lack of proper planning.

This is in contrast to the neighbourhood in Toronto where I lived, with plenty of retail shops catering to all kinds of needs, as well as cinema, cafes, bars and restaurants. It was a thriving community bustling with life and activity day and night.

Malta’s town planners – assuming such planners exist – have no clue about planning a mixed residential-commercial community. They let market forces, fuelled by greed, take their inexorable course, while neighbourhoods, like the one at Spinola Bay, decline due to lack of retail enterprise.