A company owned by US President Donald Trump has announced plans to build Australia’s tallest skyscraper.
The project by the Trump Organization and local developer Altus Property Group is for a 91-story luxury tower on Queensland’s Gold Coast. It will include a six-star hotel, 270 apartments, shops, a beach club and a swimming pool, both companies confirmed in separate statements on Monday.
The plan has received mixed reactions from locals.
“Anything Trump, I think, is terrible,” one local resident told 7NEWS. “He’s a strange individual, but he’s got plenty of dough. He knows where to put it,” said another.
Two rival petitions have emerged on Change.org. One is against the project, claiming the Trump brand sends “the wrong message about who we are as a community.” A counter-petition frames the tower as an economic necessity that will transform the area into a “thriving hub of activity and opportunity.”
The site for the proposed development has sat vacant for more than a decade after a resort built there in 1971 was demolished in 2013 due to “concrete cancer.” Multiple towers were approved in the years since but never built. The site now contains only basement construction work from an abandoned 2016 project and has been described by a local petition as an eyesore slowly “rotting away.”
David Young, the chief executive of Altus Property Group, has been declared bankrupt twice. In 1991, brewing company Castlemaine Perkins bankrupted him over his pubs and nightclubs business. He declared himself bankrupt again in 2010 after his property business failed during the Global Financial Crisis.
The project has yet to receive formal approval from the Gold Coast City Council. Even if built, the tower’s status as Australia’s tallest may be temporary. Altus has announced plans for a 101-story, 393-meter tower in nearby Southport that would exceed the height of the proposed Trump project.
Trump Organization properties include hotels in New York, Las Vegas, Scotland, as well as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Oman.
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