This time I saw it with my own eyes. No second hand accounts or calm assurances from assorted mucky-mucks that everything is alright. I finally saw what we have suspected all along about the Metropolitan Improvement District and its security guards, euphemistically called "safety ambassadors."

On the evening of June 19, at approximately 5:25 PM, I witnessed two Metropolitan Improvement District safety ambassadors ask a homeless man, who identified himself to me as George Johnson, to leave the area where he was lying at the First and Lenora building at 2030 1st Ave. in Belltown. He was leaning with his back against a gate adjacent to the building's Lenora St. side. I asked Johnson if they had threatened to call the police on him for violating the city's "no sitting ordinance." He said, "I don't care. I'm just sitting here. I'm not bothering anybody." After identifying myself as a reporter with Real Change Newspaper writing an article about the Metropolitan Improvement District (MID), I asked one of the safety ambassadors if they were going to call the police as she began conversing with her supervisor via her radio. "Eventually," she said.

At this point I ran back to my nearby apartment to get my notebook before observing further. I returned a few minutes later to observe Johnson gathering his possessions in preparation for moving away from the area where he was lying down. Before he left I identified myself and asked Johnson for his name, which he gave to me. I asked the safety ambassadors for their names and if threatening to call the police when they see homeless people sitting on the sidewalks they patrol is standard procedure. The same one who told me that they would eventually call the police if Johnson did not move on said that they would not identify themselves and that I would have to call the MID, which is overseen by the Downtown Seattle Association, if I wanted to find out about standard procedure.

The MID is what is known as a "business improvement district." BIDs are defacto private governments created by property owners within a particular neighborhood to raise revenue by way of a self-imposed tax based on property value for the purposes of hiring street maintenance crews and security guards. BIDs also create boards representative of the property owners within its boundaries, kind of like a board that oversees a condominium. BIDs are controversial, as the low-wage jobs they create are seen as threats to existing unionized government jobs. "Safety ambassadors" are also a way for property owners to push the homeless out of their neighborhoods. BIDs are nothing new; San Diego boasts having created the first one in 1970. Today there are more than 1,200 BIDs nationwide.

Municipalities are authorized through the State of Washington to create BIDs. A simple majority of property owners within a particular neighborhood can ask a municipal government to allow them to create a BID. The downtown MID was authorized through the City of Seattle this past August and has been in operation since September. The MID has about 720 members, or ratepayers as they are called in MID parlance. The MID's boundaries include all of downtown as far south as Pioneer Square, East along the I-5 corridor and as far north as Denny Way adjacent to Seattle Center. A portion of the Belltown area is not part of the MID, as a majority of the property owners within this area did not want to become a part of it. The MID is composed of three previous BIDs and the surrounding downtown areas that were not in a BID but wanted to be in one.

I have to admit that the MID has done a good job with managing its image through positive PR. If you're going to carry out the kind of destructive social policies that the downtown Seattle property owners are responsible for, then it is crucial that you recruit local service groups to help you. The MID hires maintenance crews who are mostly homeless in partnership with the Seattle Conservation Corps. The MID works with advocates for the homeless, like Downtown Emergency Services (which provides free lodging for men and women and clinical services), in training its safety ambassadors, who are hired by way of traditional means like classified ads in newspapers.

On the labor front the MID made an agreement with the Public Service and Industrial Employees, a division of the Laborers' Union which represents the city's street maintenance workers, over the duties of the MID's $7.50 per hour street maintenance workers, known as "maintenance ambassadors" (the PSIE was understandably concerned about unorganized, low-wage workers laboring on the same streets as its members). The Seattle Police Department also helps train the MID's safety ambassadors.

Not surprisingly, two puff pieces about the MID appeared in the P-I this past fall, one by Arthur Gorlick and one by Susan Paynter (who makes Bill Gates look hip). The MID achieved its positive PR image in the local media in short order.

The stated purposes of the safety ambassadors are to promote civility in downtown by intervening when they see a homeless individual panhandling too aggressively, for example, and provide assistance to tourists and referral services for the homeless. The safety ambassadors, as well as the MID maintenance employees, are overseen by Clean and Safe Program Manager Brenda Peters. "What our program does is hire people," Peters told me. "It's not designed to push the homeless out of downtown."

What I observed on the evening of June 19 is inconsistent with that stated purpose. Was George Johnson being harassed--pushed out of the MID--or merely persuaded to leave the area where he was lying down?

"It is not standard procedure for our safety ambassadors to call the police in a situation where a homeless individual is merely sitting on the sidewalk," said MID Director Bill Dietrich. "If we called the SPD every time that happened on a daily basis they would quit responding." Dietrich identified the two safety ambassadors who asked Johnson to leave the area of the First and Lenora building as Brit and Reyna. The ambassador I spoke with was Brit. Dietrich said she was mistaken when she told me that they would eventually call the police if Johnson refused to move along. Johnson was approached by Brit and Reyna while passed out, said Dietrich. After they woke him, he responded with expletives, said Dietrich. They then reminded him that he was sitting on a sidewalk in violation of the city's no sitting ordinance.

"Our safety ambassadors have no more authority than the average citizen," said Dietrich. "In addition to making service referrals for the homeless, they do make contacts with the downtown's homeless population in cases of public drunkenness and sitting." Sitting on the sidewalk from 7 AM to 9 PM is a violation of city ordinance. "If a homeless individual refuses to stop sitting on the sidewalk, our safety ambassadors will talk to them until they do move along. We never call the police unless the individual is drunk or becomes belligerent towards the ambassadors."

"I would point to the fact that we provide employment and transitional housing for about 25 homeless individuals through our maintenance program," said Dietrich. "For every case that a safety ambassador asks a homeless individual to move along when they are sitting on the sidewalks, there are hundreds of service referrals made. This is not displacing the homeless population."

Dietrich makes a good attempt at explaining away what I witnessed, but his arguments are nonsense. It takes about three seconds to figure out that any BID created by Seattle's downtown property owners is not a solution to homelessness. The "safety ambassadors" are not merely citizens, but uniformed security guards hired to represent a particular vested authority.

In fairness to Dietrich, the MID certainly is not directly responsible for displacing people in downtown, but the property owners footing the bill for the institution he manages are. There is plenty of housing construction going on around downtown, but it's all high-priced units replacing a rapidly dwindling supply of low-income housing. The MID is simply a tool for sweeping away the human debris created by a class of property owners who are hell bent on transforming Seattle into another San Francisco. The downtown business owners are mistaken if they think they can hide the homelessness they are creating. Seattle's homeless population needs shelter and affordable housing, not a no sitting ordinance and "safety ambassadors."

The ostensible mission of the MID's safety ambassadors, promoting downtown civility and making service referrals for the homeless, I find quite amusing. I see a lack of civility in downtown myself. I see the continuing yuppie condo construction that has transformed Belltown from a hang out for sailors, artists, and ordinary people into a playground for the high-tech rich. You want to promote downtown civility? Then make it a place for working people, not just the rich, to live. Why don't the greed-head property owners in downtown fully fund the city's under-funded services for the homeless, instead of pouring money into private security guards? Simple. The MID is a private government. It represents an old, elitist form of government whereby only property owners are allowed to participate in politics. This is the way the business community would like the world to be organized. The point of creating the MID is for downtown property owners to demonstrate that they can do what they damn well please. They can displace people from where they live and then tell those displaced people where to find the meager social services they refuse to fully fund. MIDs are regressive and inherently undemocratic, and they should be dismantled. As soon as possible.