Want Your California City Cleaned Up? Host a World Event.

If your California city has become dirty, blighted and increasingly unpleasant to live in, there may be a solution.

Host the Olympics.

If that’s too ambitious, invite a few world leaders. That worked for San Francisco.

Before the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit brought President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping and other foreign leaders to town, San Francisco suddenly discovered the importance of appearances.

Encampments were cleared. Streets were deep-cleaned. Fences went up. Downtown received the kind of urgent attention residents had been demanding for years.

Gov. Gavin Newsom didn’t even bother denying the reason.

“I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all these fancy leaders are coming into town.’ That’s true,” Newsom acknowledged.

Now it’s Los Angeles’s turn.

Oceanwide Plaza—the abandoned three-tower development across from Crypto.com Arena, also known as the “Graffiti Towers”—has loomed over downtown since construction stopped in 2019. Vandals have since covered floor after floor with graffiti, turning the unfinished skyscrapers into perhaps the largest monument to urban lawlessness in America.

For more than two years, the graffiti remained. But with the Olympics coming in 2028, the world will be watching. Now it matters.

This stain on the city is no longer acceptable. Los Angeles withdrew its objection to the property’s bankruptcy sale after the buyer agreed to begin removing the graffiti immediately.

California’s cities aren’t incapable of cleaning themselves up. They simply develop a remarkable sense of urgency when powerful visitors and international television cameras are on the way.

California governments are rarely short of grand programs, new initiatives, commissions, grants and studies. What they struggle to provide are the old, unglamorous basics of municipal government: clean streets, usable public spaces and communities in which people actually want to live.

Residents can complain for years. Businesses can close. Families can leave.

But invite a foreign president or the International Olympic Committee, and suddenly everyone notices the garbage.

California should bid on every major event it can find. The Olympics. International summits. Global conventions. Perhaps every neighborhood could be assigned its own visiting dignitary.

Apparently, that’s what it takes to get the government to clean up before company arrives.

The people who live there every day should have been important enough.