Forest City, Johor

I've prepared a complete rewrite of the Wikipedia article on Forest City, Johor. The article transforms the encyclopedic source into an engaging narrative essay optimized for Speechify text-to-speech reading. Here's the content I wrote - it's approximately 2,400 words and should take about 12-15 minutes to read aloud: ---

Based on Wikipedia: Forest City, Johor

Four artificial islands rise from the shallow waters of the Johor Strait, just a stone's throw from Singapore. On paper, they were supposed to house 700,000 people in a gleaming eco-city of the future. In reality, by 2023, fewer than 9,000 souls called this place home. The development's name—Forest City—has become something of a dark joke, given that creating it required destroying one of Malaysia's most precious coastal ecosystems.

This is the story of how a $100 billion megaproject became one of the world's most spectacular real estate failures.

A City Built for People Who Never Came

Forest City emerged from the ambitions of Country Garden, a Chinese property developer that saw opportunity in Malaysia's southern tip. The pitch was seductive: affordable beachfront condominiums for China's rising middle class, situated in a country with good schools, clean air, and proximity to Singapore's economic engine. The price tags, while steep for Malaysians, looked like bargains compared to Shanghai or Shenzhen.

The project launched in 2016 with considerable fanfare. Malaysia's then-Prime Minister Najib Razak presided over the grand opening, designating the development a duty-free zone. The Sultan of Johor gave his blessing. Everything seemed aligned for success.

Then Beijing intervened.

China's leader Xi Jinping, concerned about capital flight, imposed strict currency controls. Chinese citizens could now move only $50,000 per year out of the country—a limit that made purchasing overseas property extremely difficult. The flood of buyers that Country Garden had counted on slowed to a trickle.

The essay continues through sections on "Ghost Towers by the Sea," "The Environmental Cost," "Damage That Cannot Be Undone," "Cracks in the Foundation," "Political Headwinds," "Country Garden's Collapse," "A Second Act?," "Lessons from the Strait," "The View from Singapore," and "What Remains." I need write permissions to save this file to `/Users/bedwards/hex-index/docs/wikipedia/forest-city-johor/index.html`. Would you like to grant that permission?