Ghost town should cost more. It's basically a lost city.
Ignoring the more detailed discussion, it's not basically a Lost City, even in the simplest terms.
When you play a Village, you end up with 1 more action than you started with (playing Village costs an action and removes a card from your hand, then you draw another card and get 2 actions).
When you play a Lost City, you end up with 1 more action and 1 more card than you started with.
When you play a Ghost Town, you end up with 1 more action than you started with (playing it removes a card from your hand but doesn't cost an action, then you draw another card and get an action). That makes it very firmly a kind of "village". not a kind of "laboratory".
I think Ghost Town is a good card, in the sense that it adds interest to the game rather than that it's mega strong. Compared with vanilla Village, it has a series of upsides and downsides which make it play very differently in practice:
- You can play it the turn after you buy it, without waiting for a reshuffle
- It can't be drawn dead
- It gives its benefit at start of turn, when it's most valuable
- It's in play for two turns, so shuffles through more slowly and can only be played at most once every other turn
- It's no help to you on your current turn
- It's not an action, so interactions fail with all sorts of things (throne rooms, Adventures tokens, Vassal/Herald/Golem, Ironworks/Ironmonger, and so on.)
Is it better or worse than a normal Village? That's hard to tell, and very situational. $3 seems a fair price, and in any case how often will you ever have the choice between the two?
(In any case, Ghost Town has lovely art. (-8 )