Forest City: A Ghost Town Finds Its Residents with the Network School

There is a certain irony in finding one of the most vibrant communities I've encountered in what was designed to be a ghost city.

I recently visited Network School, Balaji Srinivasan's experiment in intentional community and co-living, now housed in the shells of Forest City.

Forest City sits just across the Causeway from Singapore, a massive development built by Country Garden, one of China's largest property developers. The original vision was audacious: 30,000 residential units on four man-made islands, a gleaming city for the future. Country Garden pre-sold apartments, collected deposits, and then ran headlong into the twin headwinds of China's property crisis and Malaysia's political sensitivities around foreign ownership. What emerged was a monument to overreach—pristine towers, empty streets, and the eerie quiet of a place built for hundreds of thousands but inhabited by almost no one.

But anyhow, I digress. I've written before about networks as a potential success factor for countries, and Balaji's thesis—that communities can now form around shared values rather than shared geography, eventually acquiring physical territory—is being tested in real time at Forest City. What I found was not what I expected.

A Community of Builders

What I discovered was a community of people drawn together by creation and self-improvement. I'm not sure everyone would describe themselves as techno-optimists, but that spirit pervades the place. There is an earnestness here—a genuine belief that you can design your life intentionally and that being around others doing the same accelerates everything.

The demographics surprised me. I had expected the usual suspects: young remote workers, digital nomads in their twenties chasing low costs and good wifi. Those people exist here, but they are far from the majority.

There were folks who were later in their lives, with kids who had grown up and gone off to college, seeking mental stimulation and community with people who knew them from the building rather than staying in conventional suburban lives. They had done the thing—the career, the house, the family—and were now asking: what's next? The answer, apparently, was not a golf course in Florida but a converted hotel in Johor.

There were also children, which surprised me even more. Some families were the conventional worldschoolers, already untethered from traditional education. But there were also what I'd call "civilians"—regular families who had simply brought their kids along. The day I arrived, they opened a small nursery in a converted yoga studio, a drop-off childcare option that had emerged from member demand.

The Minimum Viable City

The overall feeling I got was that the organizers had managed to gather people who are seeking community, concentrate them in one place, deliver the essentials—food, housing, exercise—and then let everything else organically develop.

This is, in some ways, an inversion. Forest City was planned down to the last detail—the parks, the pools, the commercial zones—and yet it failed to attract residents. Network School takes all of that pre-built infrastructure and applies a discovery approach to the social layer: gather interesting people, provide the essentials, and see what emerges. And things have emerged. Sub-communities have formed around specific interests, led by members rather than administrators. Businesses have opened to serve other members—not because someone did a market study, but because someone saw a need and filled it.

In the surrounding area, other businesses have popped up to serve this sudden influx of residents: beach bars, restaurants, and—rather oddly—a weight loss clinic that may have predated the community but now has a captive market. All of this in a completely built environment, infrastructure waiting for purpose.

I met with Yash, who runs events for the community. He made a point that stuck with me: "We're not getting started with building infrastructure because it already exists." They've taken over a hotel and are starting to fill up a neighboring apartment block, but there's still so much room to grow. The ghost city's curse is Network School's blessing—unlimited capacity to expand without breaking ground.

The Economics of Opting Out

The numbers are striking. It starts at $1,500 a month, all in. Housing, food, community, access to facilities. You could survive on $18,000 a year, which is a remarkable number for access to world-class amenities just across the border in Singapore and increasingly decent options in JB itself, all a Grab ride away.

For a certain type of person—a creative, an entrepreneur, someone building something online—this is an extraordinary proposition. The ability to extend your runway, to buy time to figure things out, to lower the cost of experimentation. It is, in its own way, a subsidy for discovery.

Open Questions

I spoke with a member who is organizing one of our upcoming community events and wants to invite others from outside Network School. That, I think, will be interesting to watch—the permeability between this intentional community and the broader world.

But I'm left with questions.

Can people get over the mental burden of crossing the border? The Causeway is not far, but it is a real barrier—customs, traffic, the psychological weight of leaving one country for another as a daily commute. Singapore is right there, and yet it feels further than it is.

What kind of community can grow up here? The people I met were interesting, curious, energetic. But they are also, by definition, people who opted out of something else. What happens when the early pioneers are joined by a second wave, and a third? Does the culture dilute, or does it strengthen?

I don't have answers. But it's fascinating to see this kind of self-organizing organism come to life, and I wonder if Forest City can really become a magnet for creatives and oddballs—and I mean that in the most positive sense—who want to build something new.

The ghost town, it turns out, was just waiting for the right kind of ghosts.