Make California Post a Preferred Source Talk about a towering mess.
Oceanwide Plaza in downtown LA, which stretches up to 677 feet tall, was until recently among the worst eyesores in the city.
Taggers had defaced about 250 exterior balconies — a dismal greeting for visitors to Crypto.com Arena, LA Live and elsewhere in DTLA.
The Oceanwide Plaza building stands after being cleaned of graffiti on Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026, in Los Angeles. William Liang fo CA Post It was embarrassing: so bad it verged on farce.
Now, on the heels of a bankruptcy sale and ownership change, the towers have been scrubbed clean, in part to spiff up downtown in the run-up to the ’28 Summer Olympics.
The transformation shows what LA needs citywide: a systematic approach to cleaning up the eyesores, the messes and the sidewalks strewn with tents and debris — and then keeping them clean.
Removing blight can restore residents’ pride of place; yes, before we showcase the city at the global Games, but also all the time as a way of life in LA.
And the cleaner a city gets, the easier it becomes to keep it that way.
Workers clean off graffiti on the Oceanwide Plaza towers in Los Angeles, California, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. William Liang for CA Post It’s the broken windows theory: small signs of chaos and lawlessness — e.g., broken windows, graffiti or open drug use — suggest that no one (serious) is in charge. When minor crime goes all but unaddressed, it encourages more of the same, and worse.
The Oceanwide towers, abandoned in 2019, exemplified this dynamic. A few balconies on the empty buildings were tagged in early 2024. As the graffiti went unchecked, other vandals swooped in and a 40-story mess was born.
Now the towers, acquired by KPC Square — which deployed a “master chemist” to clear the stubborn paint — are on track to realize their initial potential as a mix of a hotel, luxury condos, and shops and restaurants.
It took just 90 days of work to dramatically upgrade the LA skyline.
Those clean towers demonstrate what determined action can do.
How often do we hear politicians blame their predecessors for intractable problems, calling them too difficult, stymied by city bureaucracy, or “the way things have always been”?
That’s not leadership. It’s complacency.
No one in LA should accept squalor — however pervasive, longstanding, or towering.
