About five years ago, a project in downtown Los Angeles, called Oceanwide Plaza, halted construction. I don't know exactly what happened, but the reports suggest corruption, financing problems, and the Chinese developer running out of money.
Under typical circumstances, once you secure your financing and start construction, it should mean that you have enough money to finish the project. That is unless there are significant cost overruns, you experience a cash crunch somewhere else, and/or somebody does something bad.
In fact, on some projects, the peak equity requirement occurs before construction commencement, meaning that once you do secure your construction facility, you should be able to reduce the amount of equity that you have remaining in the project (i.e. you can pull out some cash).
Here it sounds like a combination of things went sideways. And now today, Oceanwide Plaza looks like this: