For more than a decade, the address at 21–35 Power Street and 38 Freshwater Place in Southbank has been less a construction site than a quiet graveyard of grand architectural ambitions. It is a patch of Melbourne where planning approvals have arrived with remarkable regularity, only to be filed away and forgotten, where designs have been drawn, praised, permitted, and then left to gather dust while the city moved on. Now, yet another approval has been granted — this time for a 62-storey mixed-use tower designed by Grimshaw Architects for GL Investment Co Melbourne Pty Ltd — and the question hanging over Southbank is whether this latest paper triumph will finally translate into a physical one. The approval, gazetted on September 22, 2026, replaces an earlier July 2021 permission with a new scheme containing around 480 apartments, along with office, retail, and medical centre floorspace. It is at least the third distinct planning permission for the site in just over a decade, which is a remarkable record for a parcel of land that has never seen a single foundation dug. The proposal only made it across the line after the state government stepped in, exempting it from the standard exhibition and panel process that usually applies to significant planning changes. That decision has added a layer of political controversy to an already complicated story, but it also reflects the growing urgency around housing supply in Victoria, where the promise of thousands of new homes is being used to justify faster, more interventionist planning decisions. For the people who live and work around Power Street, the approval is both a cause for cautious hope and a reminder that in this particular corner of Melbourne, hope has been disappointed before. The site has become a symbol of how easily a theoretically viable development can stall, and how many steps still lie between an architect’s vision and the arrival of cranes.
The site’s history of stalled ambition stretches back to 2013, when an application was first lodged by Freshwater No 6 Pty Ltd through planning consultancy Urbis, proposing 482 apartments, 390 hotel rooms, and a mix of retail and office space. That initial concept gradually morphed into something more dramatic: in 2015, then-planning minister Richard Wynne granted approval to Singapore’s M&L Hospitality for the Ultimus Tower, a 73-storey, $400-million skyscraper designed by Andrew Norbury of Metier 3. With a proposed height of 280 metres, Ultimus was meant to be a striking addition to Melbourne’s skyline, a slender residential and hotel tower that would have been impossible to miss. Construction was scheduled to begin in 2016. It never happened. The permit survived, however, and the site was eventually sold to GL Investment Co Melbourne Pty Ltd with that approval still intact, as if the development rights themselves were the real asset. By 2020, there were reports that the new owner was gearing up to build a 76-storey tower on the same land, yet that project also stalled before any serious activity could begin. The following year, in April 2021, Melbourne’s Future Melbourne Committee declined to support a revised 52-storey Grimshaw-designed office tower for the site, with councillors and planners citing inadequate setbacks and poor ground-level activation for such a dense part of Southbank. Even so, a version of that same scheme was subsequently gazetted in July 2021, a decision that now reads less as a confident endorsement and more as another instalment in a long-running saga of approvals that never translated into shovels in the ground. With each passing proposal, the site seemed to acquire a new architectural identity, as if the land itself was cycling through the imagination of Melbourne’s design community without ever committing to one.
The latest approved scheme is a significant departure from the office-led proposal that came before it, and that pivot may be the key to understanding why it received the green light. Rather than a commercial tower with some incidental residential space, the new Grimshaw design is a housing-heavy mixed-use building, with apartments forming the dominant use. The planning documents make clear that at least 21 per cent of the office component’s net lettable area — a minimum of 11,542 square metres — must be retained for non-residential purposes for at least ten years, which suggests the developers are being asked to preserve a meaningful workplace and services element even as residential takes centre stage. There is also a separately secured contribution of $600,000 toward affordable housing, a relatively modest sum in the context of a building worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but nonetheless a concrete acknowledgement of the political and social pressures surrounding new development in inner Melbourne. The scheme will also deliver a publicly accessible through-site link connecting Power Street to Freshwater Place, with opportunities for public art and retail activation along the way. This kind of laneway or pedestrian connection is often promised in major developments, but it can be difficult to enforce and even more difficult to ensure it feels genuinely public, rather than a privatised corridor lined with high-end shopfronts. Still, the inclusion of such details suggests that the planners who reviewed the scheme were paying attention to the criticisms that sank the 2021 office tower, particularly around ground-level life and the need for the building to engage with the street rather than turning its back on the surrounding neighbourhood. The mix of uses — residential, office, retail, and medical — also gives the project a degree of resilience, because it is not wholly dependent on one property market. If apartment sales soften, perhaps the office and medical components carry the project; if commercial demand weakens, the 480 dwellings provide the backbone. That balancing act might be what finally makes the numbers work.
The approval process, however, has raised eyebrows among urbanists, community groups, and even some planning lawyers. The Department of Transport and Planning approved the amendment through a ministerial intervention pathway that explicitly allowed no third-party submissions, citing Victoria’s 80,000-home target and the City of Melbourne’s ambitious goal of delivering 134,000 more homes by 2051. In other words, the state government deemed the housing shortage so acute that standard consultation and independent panel review would slow things down unnecessarily. Delegate Erin Baden-Smith, who made the decision, found that further notice was unlikely to change the outcome, pointing to consultation already completed with Melbourne City Council, Transport for Victoria, and Melbourne Water. That reasoning is likely to divide observers. Supporters will argue that Australia’s planning system is too slow, too adversarial, and too easily weaponised by NIMBY interests, and that fast-tracking housing projects is exactly what a government should do in a housing crisis. Critics will counter that bypassing public scrutiny sets a dangerous precedent, especially for a site with such a poor record of execution, and that residents of Southbank deserve a chance to have their say about a tower that will change their neighbourhood for decades. There is no easy answer. The Victorian government has committed itself to ambitious housing targets, and it has shown a willingness to use extraordinary powers to meet them, but the legitimacy of those decisions depends on whether they deliver actual homes, not just approvals. A planning permission that never becomes a building does nothing to house a single family, and if the ministerial intervention merely adds another dormant permit to the pile, the process will have been sacrificed for little more than a symbolic act. That is why the details of this approval’s conditions matter so much.
Perhaps the most striking element of the new permission is the timeline attached to it. Construction must commence within five years of gazettal and be completed within seven, with the Minister retaining discretion to extend either date on written request. These are not merely bureaucratic formalities; they are intended to prevent the very land-banking behaviour that has plagued this site for a decade. Under previous approvals, there was no effective deadline, or at least none enforced, and the developer was free to hold the permit while waiting for market conditions to improve. This time, the state has inserted a mechanism that theoretically forces action, although the escape clause through ministerial discretion means the pressure is not absolute. Still, the five-year window places a real burden on GL Investment Co to move beyond design development and secure financing, construction partners, and pre-sales. It also creates a sharp contrast with the 2015 Ultimus experience, when construction was promised for 2016 and then silently abandoned. Whether the new deadlines will prove any more meaningful depends largely on the economic conditions of the next few years. If interest rates fall, construction costs stabilise, and apartment demand remains strong, the developer has every incentive to proceed at pace. If the market turns sour, the deadlines may simply be extended, and the site will continue its strange existence as an empty lot with a very expensive history of what might have been. There is also the question of whether the residential-heavy mix will actually be profitable enough to justify the enormous cost of building 62 storeys in a dense urban area. Apartments are cheaper to deliver than office space, but they are also more sensitive to oversupply, and Southbank has seen a wave of residential towers in recent years. The developer is betting that demand for inner-city living, particularly for well-designed, amenity-rich apartments close to the river and the CBD, will remain strong well into the 2030s.
All of this makes the latest approval both welcome and precarious. It is welcome because Melbourne desperately needs more housing, and converting a long-stalled commercial site into a residential-led development is a sensible use of scarce urban land. It takes pressure off greenfield growth areas, makes better use of existing infrastructure, and helps create the kind of dense, walkable, mixed-use city that planners have been talking about for decades. It is precarious because the site has broken promises before, and because the approval was granted in a way that bypassed the usual checks and balances. There is a real danger that the community will look at yet another elegant rendering of a towering future and feel nothing but scepticism, having watched the same story unfold over and over again. That scepticism is not unjustified. Paper towers have become something of a Melbourne tradition, and Power Street has been one of their most faithful resting places. But there is also something genuinely different about this scheme: the residential emphasis, the mandatory non-residential floor space, the affordable housing contribution, the public laneway, and, most importantly, the deadlines. If the developer was simply looking to hold land and speculate on rising values, it is hard to imagine why it would accept such conditions. The fact that GL Investment Co agreed to them suggests at least a degree of seriousness, or perhaps a willingness to play the game because the alternative was no approval at all. Whatever the motivation, the future of the site now rests on whether the financial and political conditions align in the next few years. Melbourne is watching, and so is the state government. After more than a decade of false dawns, Power Street deserves a real building, and the city deserves homes that people can actually live in. Only time will tell whether this latest approval becomes the one that finally gets diggers on site, or whether it joins the long list of designs that looked beautiful on paper and never made it into the sky.