Perth Suburbs the Builders Walked Away From

Perth's display villages never mention the suburbs where the builder looked first, and left. These twelve addresses are on the public record. The one at number one is the reason this video exists. From karst cavities under Two Rocks to acid sulfate soils in Stirling, from the odour buffers ringing Woodman Point and Cockburn Cement in Munster to the groundwater mound beneath Banjup that state planning policy locks at two-hectare minimums, the decisions that kept builders away are all documented. The Lesmurdie hills never got their reticulated sewer connection under the state infill sewerage program, which means the Government Sewerage Policy of September 2019 now holds every block at its current size. Mount Lawley and Inglewood sit inside the City of Stirling Heritage Protection Area under a 2017 scheme amendment where knock-down-rebuild simply does not apply. On the coast, the City of Fremantle adopted managed retreat at Port Beach after cyclone Mangga removed ten metres of car park in a single night, and its own coastal engineer has put a twenty-to-thirty year horizon on the beach itself. The South Fremantle Power Station in North Coogee went to a private investment group in 2021, the deal collapsed in September 2022 when remediation estimates crossed seventy million dollars, and the heritage-listed building costs around half a million dollars a year just to stand. The Roe Highway reservation that froze Hamilton Hill and Bibra Lake for six decades was only deleted in late 2024. The Roleystone and Kelmscott fire of February 2011 destroyed seventy-two homes and found that embers travelled four hundred and twenty-one metres, reshaping every bushfire attack level assessment in the hills since. And then there is the home indemnity insurance gap that runs across the whole state: no mandatory cover exists for any apartment above three storeys, which is the legal backdrop to the Nicheliving collapse, the unfinished Sky Homes site in Inglewood, and the October 2024 ministerial deal that surrendered the company's registration in exchange for releasing more than two hundred customers to claim a capped payout, with the state covering a bill put at around forty million dollars. Every document behind these suburbs was public before any contract was signed. 0:00 Introduction - Perth's Builder Absences 1:07 Two Rocks - Karst Limestone Risk 2:39 Mount Lawley - Heritage Protection Constraints 4:09 Lesmurdie - Missing Sewer Infrastructure 5:45 Stirling - Acid Sulfate Soil Contamination 7:17 Munster - Industrial Odour Buffers 9:05 North Fremantle - Coastal Managed Retreat 10:34 Roleystone - Bushfire Attack Level Costs 12:07 Hamilton Hill - Roe Corridor Land Reservation 13:44 Banjup - Groundwater Protection Policy 14:58 North Coogee - Power Station Remediation Costs 16:25 Inglewood - High-Rise Insurance Gap 18:23 Willetton - State-Funded Builder Exit Deal