By John Loftus
The city of Seattle finally got around to cleaning up its streets, but it wasn’t for the residents; it was for the many foreign tourists flooding in this summer.
Seattle began ramping up its efforts to clean neighborhoods in 2025 ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a major international soccer tournament expected to draw 750,000 foreigners in June. On Wednesday, the city released a report detailing the improvements, which, of course, should have been made regardless of whether they were hosting a sporting event as big as the World Cup. (RELATED: Turns Out, We’ve Been Able To Stop Crime All Along)
The report found that community clean-up efforts have been a smashing success; 5.3 million pounds of waste were collected and removed, equivalent to “the weight of about 530 orca whales.” Additionally, the city cleaned up hundreds of thousands of dirty and dangerous needles littered in public places.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON – MARCH 13: Heroin syringes hang stuck in a tree at a homeless encampment on March 13, 2022 in Seattle, Washington. Widespread drug addiction is endemic in Seattle’s large homeless community, which the city is currently trying to move out from shared public spaces. The city has struggled with an uptick in homelessness and violent crime in the two years since the pandemic began. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
This is great news for Seattle residents, but the city should always be vigilant in keeping the streets clean, even without the incentive to impress foreign tourists. Why don’t they ramp up trash removal efforts and maintain that level year-round? Why does a glamorous soccer tournament, played only every four years, need to kick the city into high gear?
Infamously, in 2023, the city of San Francisco rolled out the red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit with then-President Joe Biden. All year, the downtown area is plagued by homeless encampments, needles, trash, fecal matter. Normal citizens have to tiptoe past homeless people wrapped in sleeping bags every morning during their commute. But the moment a major head of state comes to town, the city clears everything out and erects literal walls to protect the CCP leader. It would be comical were it not for the ordinary people who live in these conditions daily while still paying ludicrously heavy taxes to the government.
Both these stories prove that when cities want to do something, like clean up needles or fight crime, they can just do it. It doesn’t have to be so complicated. City workers can just pick up needles and arrest bad guys.
