HOLLYWOOD — We are, as a city, tremendous at drawing the future. Pouring it is where we run into trouble.

Consider the two parks we have promised the same corner of the 101. One would float over the freeway, a deck of grass and trees capping the trench, knitting a neighborhood back together above a quarter-million cars a day. The other would tuck onto a city-owned lot near the elevated approach: a skate park promised so many times that the children it was meant for have started to shave. Between them they represent decades of renderings, community meetings and artist’s impressions of delighted Angelenos strolling through improvements that do not exist.

I have nothing against the drawings. They are often beautiful, and they are certainly cheaper than the parks. A rendering costs a design fee and an afternoon. A park costs real money and the sustained attention of people who will not be in office by the time it opens. We are good at the first thing. We hold the ceremonies for the announcements and misplace the follow-through somewhere in the budget.

The skate park is the one that gets me, because it asks for so little. It does not have to bridge a freeway. It needs a fence taken down, a slab of concrete poured, and a modest sum the city keeps finding reasons not to spend. Instead the lot sits behind chain-link, growing weeds, while another set of kids learns to skate in the places skaters have always had to use: the drainage channels, the loading docks, the marble ledges outside the buildings that bolt on little metal knobs to stop them. The demand is not theoretical. It is skating past you right now, on the sidewalk, because we did not build it anywhere else to go.

I don’t think this is corruption, exactly, or even laziness. It is a civic personality. We are a company town, and we treat public works the way the studios treat scripts: plenty go into development, few get made, and the ones that stall are not killed so much as left in a drawer where no one has to admit they are dead. The deck park has been in development longer than some careers. Nobody will say no to it. Nobody will pay for it either.

There is a version of this column that ends with a demand: fund the park, pour the slab, keep the promise. I will make it, for what it is worth. But I have written some version of it before, and so has this paper, going back further than I have worked here. The renderings outlive the columns.

So here is a smaller ask, one that might actually be kept. The next time the city unveils a beautiful drawing of a place we are all going to love, someone at the microphone should be made to say, out loud and on the record, the year they expect us to stand in it. Then we can keep the drawing, and check.