How a $155 billion ‘eco-paradise’ fell short of its promise

3 months ago 21

Johor, Malaysia: On a reclaimed island at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula, mega housing project Forest City stands as a testament to the heady mix of rapacious ambition, cheap credit and blind faith in the appeal of “build it and they will come”.

Dozens of massive apartment towers with some 26,000 units loom over a man-made beach of coarse sand. Their residents are treated to views of the Johor Strait framed by the skyline of Singapore’s industrial port just two kilometres away.

Or at least they would be if the apartments were occupied. Many, if not most, sit empty.

Some of the dozens of apartment towers that comprise Forest City and loom over a man-made beach facing Singapore.

Forest City was billed by its developer, Chinese real estate behemoth Country Garden, as an oceanside eco-paradise that would house up to 700,000 people across four man-made islands by 2035 at an eye-watering cost of $US100 billion ($155 billion).

Once China’s largest developer by sales, Country Garden is now teetering on the brink of collapse, as Forest City scrambles to debunk its portrayal in the world’s media as Malaysia’s ghost town and a far-flung casualty of China’s devastating property market bust.

Almost a decade after it opened in 2016, just one island has been completed and thousands of apartments remain unsold or empty, while the project has been mired in bad press, suggesting its inevitable descent into white elephant status.

It has also become a magnet for social media influencers who have garnered millions of views for videos shot in its empty streets and shopping mall, while talking up the “apocalyptic” vibes and “haunted” feel.

“It’s not a ghost town. There is a community of international residents who live here,” a sales representative tells me when I visit Forest City for a mid-week stay at the 283-room sprawling beachfront hotel.

At 9am, the beachfront was empty, except for a Malaysian couple and their grandson playing near a white concrete staircase jutting out over the sand. Dubbed the “stairway to heaven”, it’s intended to be an Instagrammable spot, but it’s difficult to pass over its metaphor as a boondoggle leading nowhere.

While waiting to check in, I wandered the grounds for five hours, encountering maybe 20 visitors or residents. This paucity contrasted with the number of groundskeepers, maintenance workers and security staff roaming the facility, ensuring every fallen leaf was swept, hedge trimmed and pool sparkling to maintain the vision of a safe and immaculate paradise.

At the centre of the estate, an entire building has been dedicated to selling this dream. A large-scale model of the project spans the length of a salesroom floor, capturing the grandeur of the four-island plan spanning 14 square kilometres that seems destined to remain a fantasy. A promotional video playing in the background claims the city is home to 15,000 residents and “gradually growing”.

By midmorning, a few Chinese buyers were flipping through brochures, outnumbered by staff ready to lock in a sale.

From the outset, Country Garden gambled the success of its venture on the burgeoning Chinese middle class’ seemingly insatiable appetite for real estate. It pitched Forest City as a way for Chinese investors to diversify their assets offshore, while dangling visa incentives and the prospect of residency in Malaysia.

It has proved a bad bet. In 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping began cracking down on the credit binge that the country’s heavily leveraged developers had gorged on, setting in train a property-bubble bust that has wiped out wealth and confidence.

A large-scale model of Chinese developer Country Garden’s four-island vision for Forest City in Malaysia, which takes up the floor of the salesroom.

Across China, cities are now littered with the abandoned ambitions of its developers, many of them falling into ruin. Country Garden has more than 3000 unfinished projects and nearly 1 million outstanding homes to complete, according to Japanese investment bank Nomura. It did not respond to a request for comment.

Forest City has also suffered from lingering resentment in Malaysia at the idea of a massive project being built for Chinese buyers. This was fuelled by then-prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who in 2018 said foreigners would not be granted visas to live there, further dampening demand.

Visa controls have since been eased under current Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Even with price decreases – a one-bedroom apartment starts at 500,000 Malaysian ringgit ($182,190) – Forest City is unaffordable for many locals and remains pitched at overseas buyers.

Forest City may not be the total ghost town it’s pegged as by the press, but it’s far from the portrait of a vibrant, thriving community.

Forest City says its community has about 15,000 residents, but its grounds are quiet and many apartments empty.

At midday, many of the shops in the mall next to the hotel were still shuttered, some seemingly permanently. Those that were open had no customers, and bored shop assistants sat glued to their phones at vacant counters. At one coffee shop, the server was slumped across a table, asleep.

A prime selling point for Forest City is its duty-free status. But a licensing issue meant none of the four duty-free shops in the mall were selling alcohol − one of the main drawcards for visitors, especially those from Singapore, where extortionate taxes make a tipple all but a luxury.

One store was reduced to selling only chocolates, though upon entry its shelves were bare save for several boxes of wafer biscuits − a sales challenge that apparently required two shop assistants.

One of them, a woman in her 40s, said she had lived in Forest City with her children for four years in an apartment tower behind the mall, having relocated from Kuala Lumpur.

About 26,000 apartments have been built across dozens of towers in Forest City, many of them unsold.

“There are many people who live in my tower,” she says, explaining that most of them were Malaysian renters who commuted into Singapore daily for work. “I like it here. It’s very quiet.”

By sundown, foot traffic has picked up. A modest number of people have filtered onto the beach and a volleyball game is under way. The hotel seems reasonably buzzy, due partly to the fact that a tech school, led by US cryptocurrency investor Balaji Srinivasan, has set up shop in the lobby.

There are signs of life in towers, too, as lights begin flickering on in some of the apartments, though many remain dark.

Country Garden isn’t the only stakeholder banking on Forest City’s future. Malaysian company Esplanade Danga 88, backed by the state’s Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar, has a 40 per cent stake. Recently, the Malaysian government has ramped up its incentives to lure wealthy investors to the project, including offering a 0 per cent tax rate for those who set up family offices in Forest City.

For now, it’s quite something to climb the “staircase to heaven” and peer back at the shore and marvel at the sheer scale of Forest City − its unbridled ambition, unfulfilled promise and uncertain future.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.