Five years after the project was announced, it’s unclear to what degree construction has been completed. The city has a residential camp of 2,000 employees, according to a July report by Bloomberg. The residential camp, called Neom Community 1, is made up of “neat lawns and identical white homes” the size of shipping containers, which the report compared to “a Google campus and a minimum security prison.”
“I was not alone in realizing that it was spurious at best,” Andy Wirth, an American hospitality executive who worked on Neom in 2020, told Bloomberg. “The complete absence of being tethered to reality, objectively, is what was demonstrated there.”
