The Ballard Alliance, a neighborhood business group located 10 minutes west of Ravenna Woods whose board includes upper-class, white business owners and attorneys, is among the Find It, Fix it app’s boosters. In support of their mission to “ensure the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard remains a unique and economically vital community for its visitors, residents, businesses and property owners,” the organization’s executive director, Mike Stewart, promoted the service to residents who were concerned about the homelessness crisis. Stewart’s idea was to use this app to bombard the inboxes of city officials with homeless-encampment sightings around their neighborhood, hoping to create a sense of urgency for the city to remove homeless people from Ballard. When I tried to talk to Mike Stewart about where he thinks the homeless of Ballard should go instead, he declined to comment.

The authorities also appear to be committed to spreading word about the Find It, Fix It app as a homelessness-prevention tool. Tiffani McCoy, an advocacy organizer at Real Change, recalls an instance when two Seattle police officers came to her office after several Find It, Fix It users had reported homeless individuals sleeping outside. After telling the officer that her organization gave the homeless permission to be on their front steps, the officers tried to teach Tiffani and her staff of homelessness-advocacy journalists and organizers how to use the app in case they changed their minds. The well-off don’t want to see the homeless on the streets. But they have nowhere else to go.

Making homeless people invisible has deep roots in Seattle, especially in the years following the “Amazon boom” that began in 2012. Rather than eradicate homelessness at its root, the city’s strategy thus far has been to sweep the homeless from public view; destroying their encampments, issuing tickets for their vehicles, and installing hostile architecture that keeps people from sleeping on benches and in city parks. These strategies are endorsed by many of Seattle’s newer residents, many of whom work in its burgeoning tech industry.

On Thursday, May 31, the City of Seattle hosted a community meeting in South Lake Union, the home of Amazon and a neighborhood that has undergone massive redevelopment over the last decade, since Amazon started moving its corporate headquarters to the neighborhood. At the meeting, the city presented a plan to install tiny-house villages in South Lake Union as part of the response to unsheltered homelessness. Dozens of residents attended, and public responses ranged from “I will not feel safe walking my dog at night” to “I don’t like the possibility of more drugs and more alcohol.” Several residents offered that they had moved to South Lake Union from other Seattle neighborhoods to leave issues like homelessness behind. The area has gentrified considerably since Amazon moved in. It primarily serves techies, who tend to be white people ages 25 to 34 with college degrees and incomes that surpass the city median. Given Amazon’s investment in making the neighborhood an idyllic, walkable urban neighborhood for its workforce, it makes sense that the company would want to keep homelessness at a distance. But for its part, Amazon has launched its own initiatives to address homelessness. It has committed $40 million to the local homeless-support organizations Mary’s Place and FareStart. And the company has also announced plans to dedicate a portion of one of its buildings to a Mary’s Place shelter, where it says 200 families will be housed by 2020.