Well the Bogans like an ocean view. "Bogan" is "Chav" in UK english, not sure about American.
To be fair however, if you look at the sandy terrain in the city proper, or the older part of town that was inhabited when the old courses were built in the 20s, yes it was sandy, but not easy terrain.
We have a N-S coastline, and the first 100-200m of that is amazing rumpled links land similar to Sandwich, but by and large it has been preserved in its natural state, and that is a good thing environmentally, bad for golf.
Then about 1-2km inland there are two roughly parallel mega dunes about 50-80m high and 500m wide that run for 100km N-S. Cottesloe is built on the seaward side of the first dune and is a tricky site as the terrain is extreme and quite tight and so the course is fiddly and Claustrophobic as it tries to fit into little dune corridors. On the other hand a bit further north, Karrinyup is built on the top the first dune, falling down the leeward side and so in effect is somewhat like ANGC in being built on the side of a bloody great hill.
then once over the second dune, it flattens out and its just pretty dull for 30km until you hit the escarpment.
So while yes its sandy, in the older parts of town, the terrain is either tricky, or flat, and there isn't much of that nice middle level undulating terrain you see at Blackrock.
You are however, quite correct, if you go north of the city, its amazing land similar to the National in Vic, but there simply isn't the money to consider golf up there alas.
At the end of the day, it seems most great old golf was luck - that fluky confluence of great land being available at just the right moment in time when the finances and the intent came together. The Melbourne Sand belt hit it on the nose, but Perth sort of missed it.