Forest City, a large ghost town filled with skyscrapers on the coast of Malaysia

We have already seen many ghost towns here, usually sites abandoned decades ago and in many cases small villages.

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On the coast of Johor Bahru, Malaysia, there is a surprising case of a ghost town. It's called Forest City and it emerged in 2006 as a mega real estate project by the Chinese company Country Garden, which intended to build a kind of private city destined for upper-middle-class citizens of communist China looking for a beachfront holiday home at more affordable prices than those in their country (170,000 US dollars for a two-bedroom apartment) but unattainable for most Malaysians. The city would be built with land reclaimed from the sea, on four artificial islands in the Malaysian city of Iskandar Puteri, on the northern shore of the Strait of Johor, a very short distance from Singapore.

Construction began in 2014 and progressed rapidly. Forest City covers an area of ​​2.83 square kilometers, with dozens of skyscrapers and an area consisting of 223 luxury villas. The development was designed to create a small eco-friendly city with capacity for around 700,000 people, but its developers' plans began to run into numerous problems.

Criticism soon began to mount over the severe ecological damage caused by the construction of this large housing development in a wetland area. Construction began without the legally required environmental impact assessment, and the development soon became a source of political controversy within Malaysia and also with neighboring Singapore, which was not informed of the project, in violation of a treaty between the two countries.

In addition, the Chinese communist dictatorship imposed limits on foreign investment, which seriously hampered the plans of the Forest City developers. Furthermore, cracks began to appear in some of the buildings due to hasty construction. This was compounded by a severe political crisis in Malaysia between 2020 and 2022. But the icing on the cake was still to come: the 2020 pandemic ended up seriously harming the project, turning it into a ghost town.

We're probably talking about the most expensive ghost town in history: Forest City cost US$100 billion, and eleven years after construction began, with the buildings already completed, sales have plummeted. Currently, the town only has about 9,000 inhabitants, a far cry from the planned 700,000, and many of them only live there for the holidays.

Due to its low occupancy, Forest City is undoubtedly a very quiet town: deserted streets, silent buildings, restaurants without customers, shops that have never opened their doors, and beaches with very few people. To this day, and despite repeated attempts to relaunch the project, Forest City is one of the world's biggest real estate flops, which has also caused irreversible ecological damage to an area that should have been protected.

This Sunday, Swedish YouTube channel Yes Theory posted a video visiting Forest City and showing what it's like now, stating: "We spent 2 days exploring this strange and unusual place, and certainly found many things we were not expecting to encounter."

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Main image: Yes Theory.