So here’s the thing. Popular economics (by which I mean the sort that someone with a low pass at maths O-level second attempt can just about grasp) suggests that if supply outstrips demand then prices fall. And presumably if there is no demand at all then supply pretty much dries up, since there is no point (or money) in providing lots of what no one wants. So I’m puzzled here in darkest Malaysia as I watch what is going on all around me.
The area around the SW corner of Johor State, looking across the straits at their relatively new neighbour Singapore, is in a sort of building frenzy. In the midst of what was palm oil plantation and in some cases the remains of mineral extraction/mining, huge glamour projects are underway. Along one part of the coast an artificial harbour and marina have been created in what looks like an attempt to ape the resorts along the Mediterranean. Shopping (which here seems almost a compulsory national sport), cafes and bars are supposed to create a community feel focused around the craft bobbing on the advertiser’s blue water. Soaring above are futuristic tower blocks looking as if drawn from some children’s fantasy scribbles, as architects vie to outdo each other with vanity statement buildings. Hoardings promise visionary glimpses of paradise stretching along the coastline. And yet almost everything is empty. The swanky apartments are running at less then 10% occupancy – 10%! An acquaintance commented that he was the only one on his entire floor of his glitzy glass-and-concrete, marina-view edifice. The shops are empty, the marina likewise and needless to say the water, being where it is, is a soupy sludge rather than azure.
Just beyond this blueprint for excess lie dual carriageways where traffic lights entertain themselves, mostly unencumbered by passing cars. The roads sweep past jungly overgrown plots until, tah dah, another stand-alone giant rears up. This time it is an office block of a modest 30+ floors looking for all the world like a giant dog’s turd, although I’m sure the architect who penned its finer details did not have this in mind for their signature building.
It is clad in fetching black steel and smoked glass. But here there are multiple office blocks, rental units, business spaces and the like and pretty much every one is empty. And yet up go still more. Since there is no real centre to any of this, no genuine focal point for the area, buildings appear entirely dislocated from their surroundings. A vast multi-layered tower block atop four floors of residential parking sprawls across several acres of land alongside… nothing.
“If it was Hollywood you’d suspect it was some clever set for the latest blockbuster, all to be blown up in some grand finale”
Like Prince Charles’s carbuncles on London’s backside, these enormous zones of accommodation erupt from patches of demarcated land without apparently any connection to the wider area. If it was Hollywood you’d suspect it was some clever set for the latest blockbuster, all to be blown up in some grand finaleas eco warriors return to reclaim the land from the concrete and chrome criminals. But no, this is very much ‘for real’, as they might say. Although, like a film set, it is all mighty superficial in its grandiose claims for ‘lifestyle’ (whatever that actually means). There are the actual film studios here, under construction in a brand-new building, although their signage has intriguingly been altered from including the word ‘Pinewood’ to just Iskander Malaysia Studios. It is just down the road from the soon-to-be National Velodrome, which is just over the way from the EduCity ‘world class facilities’ for every sport, which is just next to the new, rather rundown and partially deserted shopping ‘hub’.
Residential housing is going up as if there was a crisis of supply. Last week there was an area of relatively hilly jungly land alongside the highway to Johor. This week the hills have been levelled, bulldozed in a frenzy of activity by a veritable army of diggers and dumpers. The monkeys are gone, the eagles have drifted off elsewhere and the show home is well underway for another gated community of terraced blocks. Opposite lies a completed estate with row upon row of empty units. In an irony of Monty Pythonesque proportions, these places are called things like Eco Botanic or Sunway Living or Nature’s Valley, and suggest how close to the natural world you can be when you live there. But very few are. The estate where we currently rent has grand houses that have never been occupied, ever, since they were built over 10 years ago. An even grander estate next door has palatial homes now rotting in the heat, because the owners seem to prefer to have them empty rather than reduce the rent to attract occupancy. They too have been empty for years. To my mind this seems an odd way to do business.
So how does this all stack up? How do the bean counters justify whacking up more of everything when all around the evidence is screaming that no one either wants them or needs what is on offer? When so many towers blocks lie almost dormant, when shuttered retail units just swelter in the sun, when roads lead to nowhere and where even the dogs can sleep undisturbed on the pavements, it all suggests there is something very odd going on. Rumours are of Qatari money bank-rolling the original scheme until things went pear-shaped at home; some mutter darkly about the Chinese; whispers too are of money-laundering projects. So wise and perceptive readers, crystal-ball gazers and shrewd financiers, please illuminate for me the riddle of the financial property jungle here.
