Forest City: Malaysia’s $100billion eco-city that’s now a ghost town
Whether it’s The Last of Us or The Walking Dead, we have all seen zombie movies and TV shows with those eerie shots of cities overgrown as human life has dwindled, ivy climbing up the walls of skyscrapers, and grass taking over the land where pavements once ruled, the greenery of nature painting all over the grey, abandoned concrete structures.
There are various reasons why towns are abandoned, such as economic reasons, as in the case of Bodie in California, or due to people absconding after a disaster, like Pripyat and Fukushima, which were both evacuated after nuclear accidents. However, in Malaysia, there’s a town getting overtaken by nature, which is Forest City, in an interesting case of a luxury building project that never reached the heights that were expected, now serving as a monument to greed and a stark warning to developers.
When Forest City was originally pitched, it was to become home to 700,000 people, and it’s now estimated that it’s only inhabited by 1.1% of that, raising curiosity about what happened to this development that was originally meant to be an eco-friendly, green metropolis.
The project was announced in the 2010s and built by Chinese developer Country Garden, as part of China’s broader Belt-and-Road foreign investment initiative, and it involved creating artificial islands carved from the Johor Strait on Malaysia’s southern tip; this was new, fresh land that was on the waterfront and thus able to command high prices.
From the off, there were issues with this eco-friendly development, causing damage to the coastline that had been deemed environmentally sensitive, and rumours were abound that there had been a ‘casual’ attitude towards following the correct rules and paperwork. Local fishing villages reported the quantity of fish being heavily reduced, and other claims of sustainability were questioned.
Regardless, it wasn’t long before its many towers had risen, and Forest City was taking shape, with showrooms being built, and the luxury dream homes were slated to be sold to customers. With Forest City’s location right next to the business hub of Singapore, it was expected that it would be packed with commuters, who could then travel the short distance across the border for work.
However, two major issues were about to hit the project, the first of which cropped up in 2018, when a new Malaysian government sought to change long-stay visas, with the general public upset at what it saw as rich foreign investment buying up homes in the country. These changes, as well as the risk of any further changes, stunted sales, particularly in the Chinese market.
Then, in 2020, the world changed, and with the pandemic underway, it limited travel and practically destroyed overseas property investment overnight as prospective buyers were unable to physically view potential purchases. Following this, Country Garden, much like many Chinese developers, ran into debt problems, which saw parts of the construction and marketing, with its heavy costs, paused.
There were flats purchased, but for many, they were seen as an investment rather than homes, meaning that even a large share of the units that were actually sold are still lying empty, with investors hoping that one day they might be able to make their money back.
The project isn’t dead in the water, but it’s on life support, and Forest City’s stakeholders, as well as various Malaysian government officials, are all looking for ways to resurrect the proposed city with the potential for special economic benefits or tax incentives to bring in residents and businesses. There’s also the chance that some of the properties could be used by the government or other authorities, or be repurposed into educational establishments or business parks.
Right now, Forest City stands as a curiosity, a near-empty ghost town that’s still maintained, meaning clean pavements and landscaped gardens, but one which is eerily quiet. Huge, wide roads are barely used, and the commercial areas see a fraction of the footfall that was intended, while malls are open, with lots of empty units broken up by the occasional shop or restaurant.
Many of the tower blocks are completed in shell form only, with the units inside still bare; however, it’s reported that other tower blocks are complete but untouched, with shiny floors looking like they’ve never been stood on.
Nobody could envisage a global shutdown like the one we saw in 2020, while governmental policy changes are also hard to predict. That said, Forest City will go down as a warning to developers about the dangers of over-reliance on foreign investment and the pitfalls of pricing out local populations, wherein a focus on living luxuriously without enough thought about creating a local economy and community infrastructure is not the way to conduct any business.
