Plans for Neom were recently scaled back
As the Saudis hunt for cash, the city’s planners were recently forced to drastically scale back the original size and scope of the development. Bloomberg reported in early April that the city, which developers have said is expected to stretch 170 kilometers, will not be finished anytime soon. A source close to the project told Bloomberg that officials only expect to build about 2.4 kilometers of the city by 2030. As The Guardian notes, that’s a shocking reduction of 98 percent. Presumably, Saudi officials still hope to build the entire city, although they’ll have to pick up the pace if they don’t want to be under construction for the next century. Developers also originally had much more ambitious population growth projections. Initially, the project’s backers hoped that there would be 1.5 million people living in the city by the year 2030. Now, they are expecting less than 300,000 people by that time, Bloomberg writes.
