Harger: Seattle cleaned up downtown for the World Cup. So now we know we can

Seattle plays its third World Cup match tonight, and the city is buzzing. Downtown, Seattle Center, Pioneer Square, down by the stadiums. People are smiling. In Seattle. In public.

And the city’s clean. Company-is-coming-over clean. No graffiti. Nothing unspeakable on the sidewalks. Port-a-potties where a person can actually make a pit stop. Shops hopping, restaurants and bars packed, real pride in the air. I half expected the Cleavers to stroll by with ice cream cones. Crime and arrests in the tourist zones are running lower than anybody figured.

I’ll admit it. I was a skeptic.

I’ve spent years watching Seattle promise to fix downtown and then not fix downtown, so I figured this would be more of the same. A press conference, a task force, a hashtag, and the same mess on the same corners a week later.

I was wrong. Pleasantly, completely wrong.

Seattle’s tourist zones look great. 12th and Jackson got a glimmer

Now, your mileage may vary.

The city promised to clean up 12th Avenue S. and S. Jackson Street, too. I was there yesterday morning. No sign it’s happened yet. Lewis Park was rough enough that I wouldn’t walk a visitor past it.

But a block away, the Korean Pagoda was sparkling. There were far fewer tents nearby than I’ve seen in months.

So the tourist zones look as good as they ever have. The other neighborhoods got a glimmer. Not nothing. Not enough. But a start.

That’s the split screen of this World Cup. Walk one block, and you’re in the Seattle the brochures promised. Walk the next, and you’re back in the Seattle we actually live in. The good news is we just proved the first one is possible. We’ve seen it with our own eyes.

When Seattle decides something matters, Seattle gets it done

The World Cup proved a point the city never set out to prove.

When Seattle decides something matters, Seattle gets it done. The crews rolled out. The honey buckets went up, and somebody actually services them. Officers on the corners. Visitors treated like welcome guests.

For a decade, we’ve been told the mess downtown is just permanent now. Just the way big cities work. Just what you get with a port and an interstate and a housing crunch. Nothing to be done.

Turns out it cleans up just fine when FIFA’s on the phone.

Picture a mom who drives up from Kent for a Mariners game. Parks three blocks out, walks fast with her stomach in a knot, eyes down, kids close. This week, she didn’t have to do that. She got to enjoy her own city.

So here’s the friendly question, the one I think most of us are quietly asking. Why does she only get that version of the city when the cameras are in town?

What if Seattle did this all the time?

That’s the whole thing. What if we did this all the time?

Graffiti shows up, and a removal strike force rolls out the same day. A honey bucket on every block, cleaned every morning, not every leap year.

Enforce the laws already on the books, so the 95% of folks who follow them don’t get their day wrecked by the few who won’t.

Walk somebody in crisis, addiction, or untreated mental illness, straight into treatment instead of handing them a pamphlet and pointing at a tent.

And hire enough officers to bring SPD back to full strength, so downtown feels safe on a random Tuesday in February, not just a World Cup Saturday.

None of that’s exotic. None of it needs a study. The city just did all of it this week, on a deadline.

Seattle’s $500 million budget hole, and what this week proved anyway

I’m not going to oversell it. The city’s half a billion dollars in the hole over the next three years, and a city can’t be everything to everyone. That’s just the math.

So let’s call this week what it was. It’s the old trick where you hear the doorbell and shove the dirty dishes in the oven. Looks spotless until somebody wants to cook.

And we’ve seen this movie. Seattle got all gussied up for the MLB All-Star Game back in 2023: fresh paint, swept sidewalks, the whole town on its best behavior. Then the cameras left, gravity took over, and we slid right back down to earth. That’s the usual ending. That’s the precedent.

But what if we treated that precedent like a superpower? We already know how this story goes. We can see the future, because we’ve lived it twice now. And seeing it coming is the one thing that lets us change it. Most cities have to guess whether the effort sticks. We don’t. We know exactly what backsliding looks like, which means we know exactly what to refuse to do.

And the good news outlasts the cleanup.

Whatever it took, the city found a way to do it on a deadline. The capacity was there the whole time. The crews, the cleanup, the officers, the will. We were told it couldn’t be done, and then it got done, because we decided it mattered.

We can do this when we set our minds to it and put the resources behind it. Maybe not everywhere, not all at once. But a clean, safe, welcoming city? That’s no fantasy. We just watched it happen.

It’s beautiful here. It always has been. The mountains don’t take the week off, and neither should our pride in the place.

So let’s agree to make an effort and keep it going because the company goes home eventually. And somebody’s still got to do the dishes.

Might as well be us.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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