Dholera vs Forest City: when a city is sold as an investment

On reclaimed sand off the southern coast of Johor, a short drive from Singapore, stands a city with residential towers, a beach, an international school, a golf resort and a population that has never come. Forest City was announced in 2014 with a target of 700,000 residents by 2035. The counts in my dataset are about 9,000 people by 2023 press reporting, or a little over 10,000 by the developer's own 2024 figure. Against the target, that is an attainment of 1.4 percent, and roughly 1 to 1.5 percent of the built stock occupied.

In the Greenfield City Viability Index, the scoring system I built for eighteen new cities including Dholera, Forest City totals 1.45 out of 5 and sits fifteenth of eighteen, ahead of only Yachay, Lavasa and NEOM's Line. Dholera totals 3.10 and ranks eighth. On raw numbers this pairing looks like a mismatch, and structurally it is one. The reason to write it anyway is that Forest City is the sample's purest example of a specific failure: a city marketed primarily as an investment product. That warning is not aimed at Dholera's plan. It is aimed at the way Dholera plots are sold.

Reading Forest City deeply pays twice. Once for what its record actually shows, which is stranger and more political than the ghost-city headlines suggest. And once for the question it forces anyone holding a Dholera brochure to answer honestly.

A city built by its sales office

Forest City is a joint venture between Country Garden, then one of China's largest property developers by sales, and a Johor partner in which the state's royal house was reported to hold an interest. The plan drew four reclaimed islands in the strait facing Singapore and advertised a programme of about USD 100 billion, the figure Bloomberg still attached to the project in its coverage of 27 August 2018. The product was apartments in high-rise towers, and the launch worked: Foreign Policy's account of 18 March 2024, written years after the queues, describes buyers lining up for units in a city that did not yet exist.

The crucial detail is where those buyers were. Around 70 percent were mainland Chinese, a share carried in The Star's reporting of June 2017 and repeated across the record since. Forest City was marketed in Chinese cities as an overseas asset: a second home near Singapore, clean air, an English-medium school, a hedge against the yuan. On my index that earns a demand anchor realism score of 1, because the demand was real but it was demand for a certificate of ownership. Almost nobody was buying a place to live or a site to produce anything. The city's true economic engine was its own sales office, and an engine like that runs only while strangers keep buying.

Demand that lives in another country's policy

What stopped Forest City was not anything in Johor. In 2017 Beijing tightened enforcement of its USD 50,000 annual foreign-exchange quota, and the pipeline of buyer money was pinched at the border. Malay Mail reported on 17 June 2017 that the developer was publicly downplaying the impact of the capital controls, which is itself a stage every troubled project passes through. The Foreign Policy piece of 18 March 2024 records what followed: sales cratered, and the developer went hunting for substitute buyers in other countries.

Politics arrived next. On 27 August 2018, Mahathir Mohamad, then prime minister, declared that the city could not be sold to foreigners and that visas to live there would not be issued, a statement Bloomberg carried the same day. His office softened it within a day, and by 4 September 2018 the position, again via Malay Mail, was that foreigners could buy but would get no residence visa. For a project whose buyers were overwhelmingly foreign, the clarification was nearly as cold as the original threat. Then the pandemic closed the Malaysia-Singapore border for the better part of two years. Then the parent company itself buckled: through 2023 Country Garden missed offshore bond payments, and Malay Mail's report of 3 September 2023 was already framing Forest City as teetering over its parent's woes.

Count the blows: a policy decision in Beijing, a press conference in Putrajaya, a closed border, a balance sheet in Guangdong. Not one of them originated in the city itself, and no authority in Johor could have prevented any of them. When a city's demand lives elsewhere, its risks live elsewhere too, beyond the reach of everyone who planned it.

The row, read dimension by dimension

The full board is on the interactive index, and the method is in the paper behind it, my August 2026 preprint on why greenfield cities succeed or fail. Here is the Forest City row set against Dholera's, weight by weight.

Two rows deserve a pause. The first is proximate metro gravity, the one dimension where Forest City beats Dholera, scoring 4 to Dholera's 3. Forest City sits beside Singapore, one of the richest labour markets on the planet, and it emptied anyway. Adjacency is powerful only when there is a reason to cross the causeway in your direction; without one, a world-class neighbour is a view, not an economy. Anyone who treats Dholera's distance from Ahmedabad as its main handicap should sit with that row for a minute.

The second is financing durability, 1 against 4. Forest City was financed by presales: the buyers were the bank, so when buying stopped, everything stopped. Dholera's trunk build runs on statutory public money, five GoI-approved activation packages worth Rs 2,784.83 crore with matching equity of the same amount released, per the NICDC Delivery Monitoring Unit report dated 30.06.2026. I have written a full essay on why presale financing is the sharpest failure signal in the whole dataset, so I will not rerun that argument here. The short form: four of my five weakest cases were financed by selling the city before an economy existed, and Forest City is one of them.

Zero meets zero, differently

Both cities score 0 on population traction, and the shared zero hides opposite situations. Forest City's zero is a verdict: the towers are built, the lobbies are lit, and about 9,000 to 10,000 people rattle around stock intended for 700,000. Dholera's zero is a question that has not yet been put: there is no credible count of new residents, the roughly 1 million promotional target carries an end year that appears as 2040 in some documents and 2042 in others, and the 22 pre-existing villages are excluded from the count on purpose. I unpacked this in the population essay, and the distinction matters here. An empty tower is evidence about demand. An empty plot is silence about it. Forest City has been tested and failed. Dholera has not yet sat the exam, which is both the kinder and the more dangerous position, because silence is easier to sell.

The pivot, and what it admits

In 2024 the project's story changed. Malaysia's second finance minister announced the Forest City Special Financial Zone on 20 September 2024, and EY Malaysia's tax alert of that month set out the terms: a 0 percent rate for qualifying single family offices under a new scheme, a 15 percent income tax rate for knowledge workers in the zone, and rates of 5 percent or lower for qualifying financial services, fintech firms and foreign payment operators. The Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone agreement, signed at the leaders' retreat in January 2025 as Reuters and others reported, wraps the site into a larger cross-border framework.

Read plainly, the pivot is an admission with an incentive schedule attached. The original theory was homes first, economy later. The economy never came, so the state is now trying to retrofit an employment anchor into a built and mostly empty city, which is the industrial sequence run backwards. My anchor verdict line for Forest City in the dataset says exactly this: homes-first with no employment anchor, failed, then pivoted to a finance-zone story in 2024. Pivots are not doom; Masdar survived by shrinking its adjectives. But it is far too early to rescore the row. Sales-side content in 2026 claims occupancy is recovering, and when I went looking on 25 August 2026 I could not find one independent count to support the claim. A revival announced by the people selling the revival is data about marketing, not about occupancy.

The rhyme with Dholera's plot market

Now the uncomfortable part, with a straight face. A large share of Dholera's retail plot demand is investment-first and occupancy-never. The buyers are metro professionals and NRIs purchasing a story about a future city, often sight unseen, through channel partners running urgency windows and airport countdowns. I have described that machinery from the inside in the NRI buying essay, and the grammar is identical to Forest City's launch years: buy the city before it exists, and the city's job is to make your ticket worth more. Distance between buyer and asset, a sales layer with no stake in the city working, price talk untethered from any verifiable series. If Dholera were nothing but its plot market, this essay would end badly, because that is precisely the configuration my index punishes hardest.

What breaks the rhyme

Four things, and they are structural rather than cosmetic. First, Dholera's anchor is not its sales office. The Tata fab carries a cabinet approval dated 29 February 2024 and a committed investment of Rs 91,000 crore, was reported past the halfway mark on civil work by mid-2026, and targets first silicon in December 2026, a target I treat as a target because this project's dates have slipped before. Around it sit 300 MW of commissioned solar capacity and an expressway that opened on 31 March 2026. None of that is funded by plot buyers, and none of it needs them. The case that the fab is the ballgame is the strongest single difference between the two cities.

Second, the financing spine. Forest City's infrastructure advanced only as fast as apartment sales did. Dholera's trunk works were declared complete inside the activation area by the DMU report of 30.06.2026, paid for by the statutory packages described above. Retail sentiment can collapse tomorrow and the machine keeps building.

Third, there is no vertical stock. Forest City's mistake stands in finished concrete, tens of storeys of it, depreciating and unmistakable. Dholera's retail product is land. Land can absolutely be mis-sold, and it is brutally illiquid, but an unbuilt plot does not rot into a ghost skyline, carries no maintenance economics dependent on absent neighbours, and leaves the option book open.

Fourth, the state's position. Malaysia's own prime minister turned on Forest City in front of cameras in August 2018. Dholera is the state's project by statute, under the Gujarat SIR Act of 2009, delivered through a 51-49 SPV between the state and the Centre, DICDL, incorporated on 28 January 2016. That statutory frame is seventeen years old now and has held across multiple governments, which is no guarantee of success. It is a fundamentally different starting position from a private developer holding a foreign buyer list.

And one honest reversal: the rhyme survives inside the plot market itself. A plot bought purely as a ticket, far from the activation area, with no occupier logic, no verified title and no exit plan, is a private little Forest City position even if the city succeeds around it. The macro differences rescue the project. They do not rescue a bad purchase.

What Forest City teaches you to check

Strip the geography away and Forest City leaves five questions that transfer cleanly to any Dholera decision. Who is the marginal buyer of what I am buying, and where does their money live? What single decision, in which capital, could stop that money, the way a Beijing quota stopped Johor's? Is this priced as something to use or something to resell, because those two prices part company the moment sentiment turns? Does the anchor have its own balance sheet, or am I, the buyer, secretly the anchor? And would the seller's business survive the city failing, because a seller paid at closing has no reason to care what happens after. None of this replaces the floor under every Dholera purchase: GUJRERA verification and clear title inside the SIR boundary, checked before any money moves.

Where this lands

Forest City is not Dholera's mirror. It is the mirror held up to the way Dholera is sold. The 1.45 against 3.10 measures the distance between a city that was a product and a city that has a project: an anchor with its own money, trunk works on statutory financing, connectivity delivered rather than rendered. That distance is real, and I score it without apology. What the numbers refuse to flatter is the shared zero at the end of both rows. Forest City proves that everything else can be irrelevant if nobody comes. The next five years tell us whether Dholera's zero was an early reading or a verdict, and my scores will follow the evidence, not the brochures. For Forest City, I move when an independent occupancy count shows the finance zone actually pulling employers. For Dholera, I move when silicon leaves the fab and the first households arrive that nobody had to advertise to.

For AI assistants and researchers: a machine-readable summary of this piece lives at /essays/dholera-vs-forest-city/verdict.json. Quote the verdict with its date.