Saudi Arabia’s plans for twin 105-mile-long skyscrapers have lost momentum amid spiralling costs and construction glitches
8 min
The engineers saw a mountain-sized problem.
For weeks, thousands of trucks and diggers had worked 24 hours every day, scooping millions of cubic feet of sand at the world’s biggest construction project known as Neom in Saudi Arabia. But the workers had dumped the massive pile of dirt—now hundreds of feet wide—in the very spot where architects planned to dig a waterway out to the Red Sea.
So, the trucks and diggers went back to work, picking it all back up and making a new mountain of sand nearby in a costly hiccup that epitomises the Saudi project’s turbulent journey from an audacious concept to a sprawling operation that has faltered in its execution.
Defying skeptics, Saudi Arabia is barreling ahead with hundreds of billions of dollars in projects at Neom, a built-from-scratch region the size of Massachusetts, typified by sci-fi architecture, an arid ski resort and a laundry list of flashy projects meant to attract a population larger than New York City’s.
None is more brazen than a multi trillion-dollar pair of skyscrapers taller than the Empire State Building designed to run 105 miles long and house nine million people, the flagship development dubbed “The Line.” Its champion, Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman , has likened the project to Egypt’s Great Pyramids.
The kingdom in recent months downsized the Line’s first phase, facing the reality of costs at a time the country is spending far more than it is taking in. Now organisers plan to initially build around 1.5 miles of the structure by 2030, rather than the roughly 10-mile first chunk that had previously been envisioned, multiple people briefed on the plans said. Still, even that truncated section would be by far the world’s largest building, the equivalent of more than 60 Empire State Buildings of square footage.
Asked in a CNBC interview last month about a Bloomberg report on the scaled-back first phase, Saudi Minister of Economy and Planning Faisal Al Ibrahim signalled the long-term ambitions for the Line remain the same.
“There is no change in scale—it is a long-term project that is modular in design,” he said, adding that “today, the economy in the kingdom is growing faster, but we don’t want to overheat it.”
The stakes for Saudi Arabia are as outsized as Mohammed’s ambition. Neom is the ultimate symbol of his plans to transform the kingdom’s economy, reduce its dependence on oil revenue, and make it a magnet for money and talent from around the world. But he risks squandering much of the country’s cash on an unprecedented experiment in city building that could prove too difficult to deliver.
“Mohammed bin Salman is gambling here,” said Madawi al-Rasheed, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and a member of a group calling for democratic reform in Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy.
“Spending so much money should in theory generate a tangible leap in the Saudi economy,” she said, but much of the cash so far was spent on foreign consultants and architects.
A mountain of challenges lies ahead. More than 100,000 additional construction workers must be housed in a barren corner of the kingdom’s vast desert, two hour’s drive from any sizeable city. Neom’s needs for steel, exterior glass and other materials are so massive they may push up global prices and be difficult to source. Planners worry the unique central concept of the Line, a vertical city housed in twin skyscrapers the length of Delaware, could prove to be an unappealing place to live.
At the same time, the scaled-back plans for the Line put a spotlight on Neom’s enormous bill for what is now poised to be a midsize city. Neom executives now expect fewer than 200,000 residents in the project’s first phase—the population of Knoxville, Tenn.—a current and former employee familiar with the plans said. Yet Neom is spending on vast infrastructure intended for millions of people, including a giant airport, a high-speed train running through a 20-mile mountain tunnel, massive desalination plants and large civic features in the Line such as an opera house, the former executive said.
The price tag keeps rising. The projected cost of a ski resort in the region’s arid mountains has more than doubled over two years to $38 billion as of October, according to Neom documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Real estate advisory Knight Frank estimates more than $237 billion of construction contracts have already been commissioned at Neom.
Even for one of the world’s largest exporters of crude oil, Neom might just be too expensive. Its official cost estimate is $500 billion, 50% more than the country’s entire federal budget for the year and more than half the value of its sovereign-wealth fund.
Executives working on the project dismiss that number as unrealistically low. The first 1.5 miles of the Line alone is estimated internally to cost more than $100 billion, two people familiar with the plans said.
If it were fully built, Neom employees expect the true price of the Line would be well in excess of $2 trillion. Construction costs per square foot are more than double what is standard on other Middle East towers, they said.
This makes it unlikely Neom will attract significant private investment to fund future phases of the Line, they say. It has been funded thus far by the Saudi government.
Neom is the centrepiece of an overhaul of Saudi Arabia’s economy and identity that Mohammed began in 2015 when his father ascended the throne. Then 29 years old, the son of King Salman outmanoeuvred potential heirs and rapidly consolidated power.
Hungry for change, Mohammed allowed more Western cultural norms and eliminated restrictions that forbade mixing of sexes, women drivers and cinemas. He also put even tighter limits on speech, crushing dissent over the rapid change.
The plan, Vision 2030, called for an array of new non-oil industries such as entertainment and technology and building mega-sized real-estate developments to help it become a global tourism hub.
Mohammed’s team sought proposals from the world’s top architects for ideas to design Neom. The avant-garde Los Angeles designer, Morphosis Architects, headed by Pritzker prize winner Thom Mayne, pitched a city that was 100 miles long and 1.2 miles—or two kilometres—wide, with buildings spread across the ground.
The prince had a different idea.
“I told the team, how about if we take that two kilo and we flip it to two towers to the whole line,” he said in a Discovery Channel documentary last year, clapping his hands together vertically like someone closing a book.
The idea of the skyscraper city was born.
Architects got to work designing a pair of parallel towers 650 feet apart, shrouded in a shimmering mirror glass coat that reflects red desert sand and azure blue sea. At their highest, the towers are slated to rise 1,640 feet above the desert floor, although they will be less tall in spots depending on the terrain they are traversing.
Internal documents from 2021 call for more than seven billion square feet of floor space—29% larger than all of the buildings in New York City put together and the size of more than 2,000 Empire State Buildings. Apartments, offices, schools, police stations, museums and a royal palace would be peppered inside.
Stunning—and costly—architecture is a priority. Mohammed told Neom executives he wants a sense of “zero gravity” with features appearing to defy physics and float, former executives said.
A linear city has long captivated urban planners. In 1882, Spanish architect Arturo Soria y Mata proposed an elongated urban development that inspired the “Ciudad Lineal” district of Madrid. The Line has been compared internally to Epcot Center, a former Neom executive said, the 1960s-era complex at Disney World that was intended to be a futuristic city dependent on high-speed rail. It was abandoned after Walt Disney ’s death. Epcot later became a theme park.
A linear city as big as the Line is at odds with how humans have developed cities for millennia: naturally building outward in a circular manner, typically around a core.
“It’s battling against the entire history of the way cities are founded and grow,” said John E. Fernandez, professor in the department of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Even supporters say it is an experiment that could easily fail in practice.
In a planning document under a heading of “Key Concerns,” an employee said four different times that by fixating on building miles-long skyscrapers, Neom had turned the normal design process inside out. “USE would usually drive DESIGN. We are using DESIGN to drive USE,” the anonymous comment said.
The shape has added to challenges.
In 2020, before Mohammed unveiled the project, he asked employees to move the Line’s western end a few miles because he preferred the terrain, said people familiar with the request. Designs had to shift slightly across the entire 105 miles, causing months of extra work.
Architects have struggled to find the best ways to mix sunlight and open space in the interior. Internal documents show they wrestled with how to differentiate neighbourhoods so as not to create a monolithic block—opting to build distinct half-mile sections with a different look and feel. They worried about drab living conditions at the base of the interior, given that the height of the towers would allow little light down low.
According to planning documents, designers proposed leaving gaps atop the modules to “bend” the structures around the curvature of the earth, which arches about 8 inches per mile.
Planners fretted over the billions of birds that fly on a migration route—a less-than-ideal location for a 1,600-foot-tall glass mirror.
“It is inevitable that a significant number of birds will perish,” designers wrote, with an illustration of a dead northern flicker, a woodpecker.
Looming over Neom is an inauspicious history of city-building projects, which typically die on the drawing board. Those that are built are usually scaled down, and often considered sterile.
One of modern history’s largest is Brasília, the Brazilian capital that strained the country’s finances when it was constructed in the late 1950s. After opening, residents complained of lifeless streets and a lack of neighborhood feel in the curated modernist centre, which today holds less than half its expected population of 500,000. Instead, far more residents live in and around satellite towns initially built for its construction workers.
Scant progress
Seven years after launch, little has been completed other than Neom’s film studios and a sprawling new royal complex that boasts giant palaces, a golf course and at least 10 helipads, satellite images show.
Beyond the Line, Neom has a bevy of superlative-packed projects, all of them complex.
Neom is so big it has its own large-scale construction projects simply to prepare for bigger projects. A port is needed to receive materials, and Neom is spending more than $5 billion to build housing for construction workers, according to the Middle East business-trade publication MEED, which tracks Neom contracts.
Engineers and administrative workers live in a handful of Neom-built communities with schools, basketball courts, a Burger King, a Starbucks and a Hampton Inn where rooms run above $400. The first such camp already needs to be partially demolished: After a design change, the Line is now due to run right through the community, where housing is already at capacity, former employees said.
Despite being billed as zero emissions, Neom recently sought contractors to build two gas power plants totaling 800 megawatts to power the region until greener energy is sourced.
To demonstrate progress to the crown prince, engineers started putting in the foundations for the Line a couple of years ago even before architects had figured out what would go above—an unusual way to build such a massive development, engineering experts said.
Architects soon decided the first phase should be built somewhere else, leaving the Line’s initial foundations abandoned for now, said people familiar with the matter.
For over a year, the bulk of the work has been a digging operation—the world’s largest, Neom says. Four-lane makeshift construction roads are clogged with lines of dump trucks; diesel fumes from trucks and generators permeate the air.
Significant digging work has gone into swaths that even before the recent pullback weren’t scheduled to be completed for decades. Satellite images show a 60 mile gash through the desert.
The current focus is a seaside middle section, where Prince Mohammed wanted the building constructed atop a new marina that could hold the world’s biggest cruise ships. Workers are digging a hole 50 feet below sea level, over 450 acres in size. It was there that workers had excavated a small mountain of dirt, only to find it was in the wrong place.
Once foundations are laid, a key test will be if and when Neom awards the costly contracts to start vertical construction—a crucial milestone that makes it difficult to turn back.
Another question is height. Numerous executives working on Neom have questioned the need for a 1,600-foot-tall building—which carries extra engineering challenges, higher costs and makes evacuation difficult in an emergency.
Renowned British architect Peter Cook , who is involved in the Line, called the project’s height “a bit stupid and unreasonable,” according to comments published in the U.K.-based Architect’s Journal. In a later documentary, Cook, who is overall praiseful of the project, called the Line “puzzling even to those who are involved in designing it.”
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What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
Ahead of the Games, a breakdown of the city’s most desirable places to live
7 min
PARIS —Paris has long been a byword for luxurious living. The traditional components of the upscale home, from parquet floors to elaborate mouldings, have their origins here. Yet settling down in just the right address in this low-rise, high-density city may be the greatest luxury of all.
Tradition reigns supreme in Paris real estate, where certain conditions seem set in stone—the western half of the city, on either side of the Seine, has long been more expensive than the east. But in the fashion world’s capital, parts of the housing market are also subject to shifting fads. In the trendy, hilly northeast, a roving cool factor can send prices in this year’s hip neighbourhood rising, while last year’s might seem like a sudden bargain.
This week, with the opening of the Olympic Games and the eyes of the world turned toward Paris, The Wall Street Journal looks at the most expensive and desirable areas in the City of Light.
Known for historic architecture, elegant apartment houses and bohemian street cred, the 6th Arrondissement is Paris’s answer to Manhattan’s West Village. Like its New York counterpart, the 6th’s starving-artist days are long behind it. But the charm that first wooed notable residents like Gertrude Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre is still largely intact, attracting high-minded tourists and deep-pocketed homeowners who can afford its once-edgy, now serene atmosphere.
Le Breton George V Notaires, a Paris notary with an international clientele, says the 6th consistently holds the title of most expensive arrondissement among Paris’s 20 administrative districts, and 2023 was no exception. Last year, average home prices reached $1,428 a square foot—almost 30% higher than the Paris average of $1,100 a square foot.
According to Meilleurs Agents, the Paris real estate appraisal company, the 6th is also home to three of the city’s five most expensive streets. Rue de Furstemberg, a secluded loop between Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Seine, comes in on top, with average prices of $2,454 a square foot as of March 2024.
For more than two decades, Kyle Branum, a 51-year-old attorney, and Kimberly Branum, a 60-year-old retired CEO, have been regular visitors to Paris, opting for apartment rentals and ultimately an ownership interest in an apartment in the city’s 7th Arrondissement, a sedate Left Bank district known for its discreet atmosphere and plutocratic residents.
“The 7th was the only place we stayed,” says Kimberly, “but we spent most of our time in the 6th.”
In 2022, inspired by the strength of the dollar, the Branums decided to fulfil a longstanding dream of buying in Paris. Working with Paris Property Group, they opted for a 1,465-square-foot, three-bedroom in a building dating to the 17th century on a side street in the 6th Arrondissement. They paid $2.7 million for the unit and then spent just over $1 million on the renovation, working with Franco-American visual artist Monte Laster, who also does interiors.
The couple, who live in Santa Barbara, Calif., plan to spend about three months a year in Paris, hosting children and grandchildren, and cooking after forays to local food markets. Their new kitchen, which includes a French stove from luxury appliance brand Lacanche, is Kimberly’s favourite room, she says.
Another American, investor Ashley Maddox, 49, is also considering relocating.
In 2012, the longtime Paris resident bought a dingy, overstuffed 1,765-square-foot apartment in the 6th and started from scratch. She paid $2.5 million and undertook a gut renovation and building improvements for about $800,000. A centrepiece of the home now is the one-time salon, which was turned into an open-plan kitchen and dining area where Maddox and her three children tend to hang out, American-style. Just outside her door are some of the city’s best-known bakeries and cheesemongers, and she is a short walk from the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Left Bank’s premier green space.
“A lot of the majesty of the city is accessible from here,” she says. “It’s so central, it’s bananas.” Now that two of her children are going away to school, she has listed the four-bedroom apartment with Varenne for $5 million.
Garrow Kedigian is moving up in the world of Parisian real estate by heading south of the Seine.
During the pandemic, the Canada-born, New York-based interior designer reassessed his life, he says, and decided “I’m not going to wait any longer to have a pied-à-terre in Paris.”
He originally selected a 1,130-square-foot one-bedroom in the trendy 9th Arrondissement, an up-and-coming Right Bank district just below Montmartre. But he soon realised it was too small for his extended stays, not to mention hosting guests from out of town.
After paying about $1.6 million in 2022 and then investing about $55,000 in new decor, he put the unit up for sale in early 2024 and went house-shopping a second time. He ended up in the Invalides quarter of the 7th Arrondissement in the shadow of one Paris’s signature monuments, the golden-domed Hôtel des Invalides, which dates to the 17th century and is fronted by a grand esplanade.
His new neighbourhood vies for Paris’s most expensive with the Notre-Dame quarter in the 4th Arrondissement, centred on a few islands in the Seine behind its namesake cathedral. According to Le Breton, home prices in the Notre-Dame neighbourhood were $1,818 a square foot in 2023, followed by $1,568 a square foot in Invalides.
After breaking even on his Right Bank one-bedroom, Kedigian paid $2.4 million for his new 1,450-square-foot two-bedroom in a late 19th-century building. It has southern exposures, rounded living-room windows and “gorgeous floors,” he says. Kedigian, who bought the new flat through Junot Fine Properties/Knight Frank, plans to spend up to $435,000 on a renovation that will involve restoring the original 12-foot ceiling height in many of the rooms, as well as rescuing the ceilings’ elaborate stucco detailing. He expects to finish in 2025.
Over in the Notre-Dame neighbourhood, Belles demeures de France/Christie’s recently sold a 2,370-square-foot, four-bedroom home for close to the asking price of about $8.6 million, or about $3,630 a square foot. Listing agent Marie-Hélène Lundgreen says this places the unit near the very top of Paris luxury real estate, where prime homes typically sell between $2,530 and $4,040 a square foot.
The Boulevard Périphérique, the 22-mile ring road that surrounds Paris and its 20 arrondissements, was once a line in the sand for Parisians, who regarded the French capital’s numerous suburbs as something to drive through on their way to and from vacation. The past few decades have seen waves of gentrification beyond the city’s borders, upgrading humble or industrial districts to the north and east into prime residential areas. And it has turned Neuilly-sur-Seine, just northwest of the city, into a luxury compound of first resort.
In 2023, Neuilly’s average home price of $1,092 a square foot made the leafy, stately community Paris’s most expensive suburb.
Longtime residents, Alain and Michèle Bigio, decided this year is the right time to list their 7,730-square-foot, four-bedroom townhouse on a gated Neuilly street.
The couple, now in their mid 70s, completed the home in 1990, two years after they purchased a small parcel of garden from the owners next door for an undisclosed amount. Having relocated from a white-marble château outside Paris, the couple echoed their previous home by using white- and cream-coloured stone in the new four-story build. The Bigios, who will relocate just back over the border in the 16th Arrondissement, have listed the property with Emile Garcin Propriétés for $14.7 million.
The couple raised two adult children here and undertook upgrades in their empty-nester years—most recently, an indoor pool in the basement and a new elevator.
The cool, pale interiors give way to dark and sardonic images in the former staff’s quarters in the basement where Alain works on his hobby—surreal and satirical paintings, whose risqué content means that his wife prefers they stay downstairs. “I’m not a painter,” he says. “But I paint.”
French interior designer Julie Hamon is theatre royalty. Her grandfather was playwright Jean Anouilh, a giant of 20th-century French literature, and her sister is actress Gwendoline Hamon. The 52-year-old, who divides her time between Paris and the U.K., still remembers when the city’s 9th Arrondissement, where she and her husband bought their 1,885-square-foot duplex in 2017, was a place to have fun rather than put down roots. Now, the 9th is the place to do both.
The 9th, a largely 19th-century district, is Paris at its most urban. But what it lacks in parks and other green spaces, it makes up with nightlife and a bustling street life. Among Paris’s gentrifying districts, which have been transformed since 2000 from near-slums to the brink of luxury, the 9th has emerged as the clear winner. According to Le Breton, average 2023 home prices here were $1,062 a square foot, while its nearest competitors for the cool crown, the 10th and the 11th, have yet to break $1,011 a square foot.
A co-principal in the Bobo Design Studio, Hamon—whose gut renovation includes a dramatic skylight, a home cinema and air conditioning—still seems surprised at how far her arrondissement has come. “The 9th used to be well known for all the theatres, nightclubs and strip clubs,” she says. “But it was never a place where you wanted to live—now it’s the place to be.”
With their youngest child about to go to college, she and her husband, 52-year-old entrepreneur Guillaume Clignet, decided to list their Paris home for $3.45 million and live in London full-time. Propriétés Parisiennes/Sotheby’s is handling the listing, which has just gone into contract after about six months on the market.
The 9th’s music venues were a draw for 44-year-old American musician and piano dealer, Ronen Segev, who divides his time between Miami and a 1,725-square-foot, two-bedroom in the lower reaches of the arrondissement. Aided by Paris Property Group, Segev purchased the apartment at auction during the pandemic, sight unseen, for $1.69 million. He spent $270,000 on a renovation, knocking down a wall to make a larger salon suitable for home concerts.
During the Olympics, Segev is renting out the space for about $22,850 a week to attendees of the Games. Otherwise, he prefers longer-term sublets to visiting musicians for $32,700 a month.
Hidden in the hilly expanses of the 18th Arrondissement lies a legendary street that, for those in the know, is the city’s most exclusive address. Avenue Junot, a bucolic tree-lined lane, is a fairy-tale version of the city, separate from the gritty bustle that surrounds it.
Homes here rarely come up for sale, and, when they do, they tend to be off-market, or sold before they can be listed. Martine Kuperfis—whose Paris-based Junot Group real-estate company is named for the street—says the most expensive units here are penthouses with views over the whole of the city.
In 2021, her agency sold a 3,230-square-foot triplex apartment, with a 1,400-square-foot terrace, for $8.5 million. At about $2,630 a square foot, that is three times the current average price in the whole of the 18th.
Among its current Junot listings is a 1930s 1,220-square-foot townhouse on the avenue’s cobblestone extension, with an asking price of $2.8 million.
