A stunning, tourist-friendly waterfront city finds one of its iconic neighborhoods tinged with intimidation and fear.

Some City Hall politicos and Police Department brass believe they have an answer: an ordinance banning sitting or lying on public sidewalks would give officers a tool, they say, to move along those who are frightening passers-by. But in a very liberal town, detractors say the legislation will target the poor and plan sidewalk sit-ins in protest.

It's San Francisco in 2010. But it was also Seattle in 1993.

When residents and merchants of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood complained of being harassed by nasty thugs with pit bulls, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proposed a sit/lie ban based on Seattle's law, largely because it withstood a federal court challenge.

But 17 years after Seattle became the first city in the country to pass such a ban, its impact remains as gray and cloudy as the city in which the law was born.

While downtown has become safer, that's largely because of other factors including development initiatives that brought in a host of new stores. Police officers rarely write tickets for violating the sit/lie ban because people largely move on when warned, and advocates say the law merely moves homeless people around all day - keeping them less visible, but doing little to get them off the streets.

In some neighborhoods, unsavory street behavior persists and a new hubbub over a proposal to ban aggressive panhandling dominates Seattle's City Hall and headlines, demonstrating that perhaps not much has changed since 1993.

Setting a precedent

Seattle's ban sprouted in the office of then-City Attorney Mark Sidran, whose championing of the law earned him comparisons to Satan in Seattle's alternative weekly newspaper, the Stranger.

On a recent morning at a coffee shop in downtown Seattle, Sidran, now a consultant in the energy-efficiency industry, used the tableau in the window to explain how the infamy began. He pointed down the street to the former site of Frederick & Nelson, a historic department store that closed its flagship location there in 1992.

The departure left an entire city block empty and, like falling dominoes, led to more store closures. People began sleeping and camping in the doorways of vacant shops, spraying the buildings with graffiti and selling drugs. A card table was set up on the sidewalk to hand out free condoms and run a needle exchange program.

Pedestrians complained of feeling scared just walking down the street, and fewer shoppers meant less sales tax revenue for the city.

Then-Mayor Norm Rice promoted a package of economic development laws aimed at revitalizing downtown while Sidran wrote a package of "civility laws" including the sit/lie ban.

"The left thinks it's a civil liberty to die in the gutter," Sidran said. "There's an effort to transform this issue into one about civil rights, but it's really about common courtesy. ... It's a sidewalk. If it was something else, they'd call it a sidelie or a sidesit."

Affecting just the downtown area between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m., the ban doesn't apply to those waiting for a bus, watching a parade or participating in a demonstration. Police are required to warn violators to move on before issuing a $50 citation.

The ban, along with Sidran and Rice's other legislation, passed the City Council handily in the fall of 1993. But within a month, the law met legal challenges that ultimately resulted in it being upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1996. Cities nationwide watched the Seattle case closely and adopted their own versions. Santa Cruz and Berkeley were among the earliest.

Pointing out the coffee shop's window once more, Sidran said the bustling downtown filled with sparkling shopping plazas, throngs of pedestrians and few vagrants is no accident.

"It was the result of hard work and conscious strategy facilitated by City Hall," he said.

Using the law in S.F.

Newsom hopes for a similar turnaround in San Francisco.

Earlier this month, he introduced legislation at the Board of Supervisors to create a sit/lie ban from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. citywide so it doesn't merely move the behavior a few blocks away.

The idea came from Police Chief George Gascón after he heard residents and merchants in the Haight complain that bullies were scaring people and refusing to get out of their way.

Newsom, who moved into the Upper Haight last year, resisted the idea until walking along the famous street with his infant daughter and seeing a man who's always sitting in the same storefront there yet again with his crack pipe.

Newsom said homeless advocates have yet to come up with a better idea.

"Maybe we can have a candlelight vigil," he said. "Let's go out and hold hands and have some pretty music and hear speeches that mean nothing. What else do you have in mind? There's that effort, and then there's reality."

Newsom's proposal has already faced stiff opposition from the city's public defender, homeless advocates and clergy who say it will target the poor. The Board of Supervisors is unlikely to pass the legislation, and the mayor has said he will take it to the ballot.

The mayor said he's confident police officers will compassionately enforce the law.

"I proved them wrong on Care Not Cash, I proved them wrong on aggressive panhandling, and I want to prove them wrong on this," he said.

He may want to take Sidran's advice, however: ditch the citywide proposal and focus on commercial corridors. The more narrowly tailored, Sidran said, the more likely San Francisco's law will hold up in court.

A form of 'fascism'

To John Fox, director of the Seattle Displacement Coalition, a homeless advocacy group, politicians like Newsom and Sidran aren't worth the paper upon which their mean-spirited laws are written.

Fox helped organize numerous sit-ins to protest Sidran's sit/lie ban and called the mid-1990s "one of the most contentious periods in Seattle's recent political history."

"It's fascism on Seattle's streets," he said of the ban. "It gives police complete authority over a segment of our community. ... Their right to just be here is in jeopardy."

In truth, Seattle police officers don't enforce the sit/lie ban much. They issued 57 citations in 2009 and 77 in 2008.

Both sides of the debate agree that doesn't much matter - and that the authority the ban gives a police officer to issue a stern "Move along" is what has helped drive vagrants out of downtown.

Rick Friedhoff, director of the Compass Center, which runs Seattle shelters and other programs for the homeless, said the problem comes from people having nowhere to go when police order them to move.

He said King County has 2,500 shelter beds and 3,000 transitional housing beds, but 8,500 homeless people. A count of homeless people on the streets at 2 a.m. Jan. 29 found 1,986 in Seattle and 2,759 countywide.

For those lucky enough to find a bed, they're awakened around 6 a.m. and then have scant choices on where to spend their day. Compass Center has a day center, but it accommodates just 80 people.

"Seattle is fairly liberal, and they want to do the right thing, but they have not dedicated a lot of resources to it," Friedhoff said.

Kate Joncas, president of the Downtown Seattle Association, said advocates always decry a lack of services - but that's a separate issue from keeping downtown safe and livable.

"You can't hold a neighborhood hostage to solve homelessness," said Joncas, whose association is funded through extra taxes levied on area property owners.

They pay the salaries of 30 "concierges" who fan the streets in yellow jackets to answer tourists' questions and direct homeless people into services. They're trained by the police to spot and report crime and frequently use the sit/lie ban to move people.

On the move

"What it's really meant is that homeless people are on the move in the downtown area," said Tim Harris, director of Real Change, a Seattle paper akin to San Francisco's Street Sheet.

The paper is sold to the poor for 35 cents and resold for $1. The profits go to the 400 people hawking the papers. Sixty percent of sellers are homeless, but only 15 percent use shelters because there are too few beds, Harris said.

He added that downtown - due to the sit/lie ban, sweeps of homeless encampments, crackdowns on sleeping in parks and other policies - is no longer an attractive option for them.

Harris founded Real Change in 1994, and the sit/lie ordinance was one of his first big stories. Wearing a T-shirt reading "Be Silent, Consume, Die," he pulled out one of the paper's first issues.

A photo essay titled "Architecture of Oppression" showed downtown benches constructed with metal bars running down the middle, a big metal tube serving as seating in a bus shelter and other resting places constructed to make it impossible to lie down.

Near the Real Change newsroom is a drug rehab center, and about a dozen people recently sat on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes. One elderly woman who didn't want her name used said she's been homeless for 10 years and has never been told by police not to sit on a sidewalk.

"It's a ridiculous law," she said. "You've got to sit down to rest somewhere."

The Real Change newsroom and the rehab center are located in Belltown, just north of downtown's high-rises. Similar to the Haight, it is known for its restaurant, arts and music scene (Nirvana and Pearl Jam played there), but it's also rough around the edges.

The sit/lie ban applies here, too, but you wouldn't know it. Several vagrants sat against the wall of a convenience store on a recent day, and the area was rife with litter, graffiti, people smoking crack and panhandlers. One liquor store opens at 6 a.m.

Richard Nordstrom, president of the Belltown Community Council, said there have been scary incidents lately - like the condo owner on his way to work who declined to give money to a panhandler and was hit in the face so hard his jaw is still wired shut.

"You have to start looking for ways to disrupt the pattern of behavior," Nordstrom said. That's why he supports the sit/lie ban, as well as new legislation to ban aggressive panhandling within 15 feet of ATM machines or parking pay stations.

Crafting a new law

Proposed by City Councilman Tim Burgess, it would come with the same $50 penalty as the sit/lie ban.

"We're not interested in tickets being issued," Burgess said. "We're interested in the problem being resolved."

Like deja vu, it's aimed at improving downtown, which lately has seen a rise in petty theft and robbery. Police officers say they need another tool to address problem behavior. Residents and tourists tell stories of being harassed by aggressive panhandlers. Opponents say it's mean-spirited and that aggressive panhandling isn't a big problem anyway.

The Stranger, the weekly newspaper, had a headline on its cover earlier this month reading, "Is Tim Burgess the new Mark Sidran?"

The legislation will probably be voted upon sometime next month.