‘Graffiti drives me crazy’: DSA stresses what work needs to be done ahead of 2026 World Cup

Seattle is just days away from officially being one year away from hosting the 2026 World Cup, and there is still a ton of work to do, according to the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA).

“It’s nice to have a marker, a milestone, a big event that everybody can sort of rally around,” Jon Scholes, president and CEO of DSA, said on “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “A date in a line in the sand out there in June 2026, so there’s been a lot of good work to date. I mean, we should be doing this stuff anyway.”

That “stuff” Scholes cited includes the removal of graffiti that covers much of the downtown neighborhood.

“The graffiti drives me crazy,” Scholes said. “I would say, in the city and in downtown, we have a lot less graffiti than we did two years ago, and I do credit the mayor for his actions there. I think where we all see it, where we haven’t seen as much progress, is on the freeway walls, and we need a lot more help from our friends at the State Department of Transportation (SDOT) and WSDOT on that front to make a better experience.”

Three-quarters of a million people expected for the World Cup

Approximately 750,000 visitors are expected to come to Seattle for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. With this surge of tourism incoming, Seattle is working toward hiring more police officers, a trend Scholes is already seeing come to fruition.

“We have more officers and have more folks that have applied to be officers in the last three, four months than we’ve had in 10 years,” Scholes said. “We are on pace to hire 170 officers this year. We’ve got a great new police chief who is a terrific leader and has the respect of his officers in this department and the business community. I hope we can use this World Cup event to mobilize more action, and we should then sustain it.”

Violent crime in downtown Seattle has been on the decline, according to the DSA’s latest State of Downtown report, starting late last year. From September to December 2024, violent crime in key areas, including Third Avenue and Pine Street, dropped by 50% compared to two years ago. Observed drug activity also fell by 30%.

“We’re in a better place when it comes to violent crime and drug activity, but it’s not as good as it needs to be,” Scholes said. “We have too many guns in the wrong hands, and what used to be a fist fight is often a gunfight, and that’s not so much a downtown thing, that’s also regional, statewide.

“It was chaotic in downtown two, three years ago,” Scholes added. “We had tents everywhere, and we had sex trafficking and drug trafficking out of those tents.”

Listen to the full conversation here.

Listen to John Curley weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here