Disjointed, derelict, depressing: What’s gone wrong with Perth?

On a post-radio show trip into Perth city’s beating retail heart yesterday to buy a winter sweater, the lingering impression was just how badly our city is struggling.

Perth’s social problems have become starkly visible as COVID-19 draws workers away from the city.

Yes, it was a freezing and windswept day, but that was merely a punctuation mark on an altogether unpleasant experience to the senses: the sights, sounds and smells.

The city feels hollowed out and it’s clear that many workdays are now shifted to WFH permanently.

Expensive private and public sector investments have failed to deliver transformative outcomes, and homelessness and antisocial behaviour have never been so obvious and apparent.

A walk from the Pier Street car park towards the malls takes you past a string of empty retail premises and the detritus of rough sleepers.

The QT hotel, not yet three years old, is one of Perth’s newest and smartest with a highly rated restaurant and sceney bar, but it’s hard to believe out of towners could be pleased about the greeting they get when they step out onto Murray Street.

And yes, those neglected Historic Heart planter boxes — installed in late 2017 to “signify new energy and change in the neighbourhood” — are indeed a disgrace.

At the other end of the Hay Street Mall the landlords at Raine Square have pumped tens of millions into a revamped forecourt at the foot of Bankwest’s offices, but it yesterday rang out with unprintable language at extraordinary volume, the result apparently of a dispute over a missing/stolen bicycle.

Raine Square has failed to deliver vibrancy to the city.Credit: David Prestipino

Further west the two-year-old Art Series Adnate Hotel, with its pool and bar concept adapted from one of Hollywood’s top nightlife outfits, is closed indefinitely.

Maybe this is part of the city’s problem. Too many precincts, too many masterplans, too spread out.

COVID has not helped but it can’t all be due to the pandemic. Retail trade is booming, for example, but more bricks and mortar tenancies in formerly A-grade locations are empty.

This is not an overnight phenomenon — it is the result of years of steady deterioration — but equally it seems we have not hit bottom.

The city is in a bad way and it is fair to wonder what return the billions of dollars spent over the last decade have returned in terms of amenity and liveability.

It’s more than a decade since work began on the hundred-year dream of sinking the railway line that separated the city from Northbridge, and eight years since the railworks component was completed.

The underground bus station has been up and running for five years, and the only part of the precinct that can really be said to be performing well is the Perth Arena.

It’s hosted hundreds of events and created memories for hundreds of thousands, but it is a destination in its own right and not particularly integrated in any real sense to its surroundings, not helped by the massive new rail wall on its northern side.

Yagan Square has moments of activation when temporary attractions are plonked on adjacent vacant areas, but it is no more than a thoroughfare at best to be hastily traversed on foot.

Yagan Square has mainly been a thoroughfare.

The pub, the Shoe, performs well but otherwise the market hall concept has been a disaster and nothing links the square to the rail station in any sort of organic, inviting way.

More than a billion dollars was spent on the precinct and thus far it is an abject failure, and it can only be hoped that Edith Cowan University’s arrival in the coming years rescues this botched, wasted opportunity.

Down on the foreshore is Elizabeth Quay, another showpiece investment that represented Perth’s changing face.

Its kids’ water playground is superb, the footbridge marvellous for joggers or cyclists and the Ritz Carlton seems to do good accommodation and food and beverage service.

The amphitheatre-like dress circle around the water has been used for a handful of creative public events, but if you have been to the Quay, how often have you been drawn back?

Clearly, there are still development lots to be built out and maybe it will be a winner in a few years, but the very best you could say is that at this moment, it has not hit its straps.

Up the hill a bit, Adrian Fini’s State Buildings redevelopment features a clutch of wonderful restaurants and some of the city’s most inviting public spaces. The adjacent City of Perth Library is a fine public building (as of course is St Georges Cathedral) but they do not feel connected as was the vision of the Cathedral Square concept.

And maybe this is part of the city’s problem. Too many precincts, too many masterplans, too spread out.

The Arena bookends City Link to the west while the State Theatre is over the Horseshoe Bridge while the Concert Hall is down on the Terrace.

Where is Perth’s heart and focal point for public assembly? Is it Forrest Place (where a fairly ordinary café has now become a cause celebre), the pedestrian malls, Cathedral Square, Yagan Square, Hibernian Place near the Westin or the Northbridge Piazza?

Each of these spaces have been created or overhauled in the last 15 years at extravagant expense by three tiers of government and private investment, yet the whole is very much less than the sum of the parts.

And with fewer city workers coming in each day, what is left is increasingly visible and confronting evidence drug, mental health and social difficulties which exacerbate the impulse to give “town” a miss.