Drugs and crime are plaguing a Minneapolis transit station. Neighbors say there’s only one option.

Residents around a south Minneapolis light-rail station say drug use and crime has gotten so bad that the only solution is to close a well-used footpath.

Where the Blue Line light rail stretches down Hiawatha Avenue in south Minneapolis, numerous large apartment buildings have sprouted in recent years. Yet the promise of thousands of new residents hasn’t infused the streets with commensurate foot traffic. Neighbors say that’s because of persistent problems with public drug use, break-ins and trash.

The businesses clustered at 46th Street and Hiawatha have formed a coalition to exchange strategies, like going cashless and proclaiming it on storefront signs. The neighbors who live adjacent to the transit station say the antisocial behaviors they’ve been documenting for years have gotten worse this summer — to the point that they’re pushing Metro Transit to consider a last-ditch approach: closing a high-traffic footpath between the station and their neighborhood.

That’s a tough case to make to an agency whose mission is to increase access to public transit — especially after a ridership survey this spring showed nearly 70% of respondents opposed closing the path.

But the handful of homeowners who live immediately next to the 46th Street station say they are enduring an intense concentration of problems that others can’t fathom.

“If it’s not on your front lawn, it’s really easy to look the other way, or walk around it quick, and as soon as you’re past it, it’s no longer affecting you,” said Amy Macht. “This city is hurting with addiction, and I don’t think our elected officials want to acknowledge just how bad it is.”

Her long-running social media account, Karenthecamera, has captured countless hours of people in various states of crisis, wandering from the station, using drugs, having sex, defecating and littering the sidewalk with drug paraphernalia such as tinfoil cook kits. One house had its wooden fence demolished and the dogs set loose.

“When we started the conversation, we knew this was going to be a little bit of a jurisdictional everyone-pointing-at-somebody-else,” said Pat Sheehan, whose family moved near the 46th Street station last year. They were excited to take advantage of the Blue Line but were soon disillusioned. “Police aren’t necessarily my preferred resolution for this,” Sheehan said. “I’d much rather have things put in to be more preventative than punitive.”

Metropolitan Council Member Robert Lilligren acknowledged that homelessness and addiction have stressed transit stations across the south side, especially at Franklin Avenue and at Lake Street. He said he is not in favor of closing the footpath, but help is coming to 46th Street station, he said. As of last week, Metro Transit has started paying private security to staff the station from noon to 8 p.m. at least through the end of this year.

“We recognize that what happens in the community is reflected on transit, and what happens on transit is conversely reflected in the communities that we serve,” Metro Transit spokesperson Drew Kerr said. “If you’re a resident near the station, where the line begins and ends doesn’t really matter to you. You just want the problem to be solved, and that’s why we work with partners, including the city, to address challenges as a group. We’re not doing any of this in isolation.”

Neighbors at 46th and Hiawatha say they’ve contacted every government jurisdiction and large landlord in the area. They have extra lights and hostile landscaping. They pick up drug residue on their own. And they’ve established relationships with some of the people they see struggling on the street.

Nancy Ford, who owns the Repair Lair a few blocks away, is constantly on the patrol. She lets the authorities know about encampments that develop, nags people to pick up their empty beer cans and calls the ambulance for those passed out on the street.

She has a pernicious reputation as a “people-policer,” but the truth is that she really cares, said Matthew Clarkin, who was homeless and a part of the problem at 46th and Hiawatha before getting sober. Now he rents an apartment near Ford’s shop and drops in about once a week to chat about the neighborhood.

Clarkin used to be part of a larger group of people who would drink under a tree near the Walgreens and take turns panhandling in the median, he said. Some have since died. He was always in and out of the emergency room, too, Clarkin said — and he said he might be dead if it weren’t for a doctor who threatened to civilly commit him, residential treatment programs that kept him accountable and Ford, who once gave him a place to stay and helped him apply for jobs.

“What I started to see, towards the end of my sitting on the street, it just wasn’t the alcohol anymore. It was all the other drugs, it was the fentanyl,” said Clarkin. “If they can see the alternative to that lifestyle ... that just takes time, and I don’t think a lot of us have the patience to do the baby steps.”

On one of their recent visits, Ford and Clarkin discussed a woman they both knew from the street who had skipped an appointment for an apartment that an outreach worker found for her. They don’t know what to make of that, except to chalk it up to mental illness and a deep distrust of anyone offering help.

“The last thing you want to do is have to worry about some driver coming down Hiawatha Avenue and hitting and killing somebody because they staggered into the street,” said Ford. “How we can sit back and not be more compassionate about this?”

The next meeting of businesses at 46th and Hiawatha is coming up, and anyone interested in attending should reach out to Council Member Aurin Chowdhury’s office.

One topic of discussion is the city’s ongoing development of a “Transit Safety Pilot,” which would have non-police security agents monitoring livability issues that spill off Metro Transit property into surrounding city spaces.

Even though the footpath between the 46th Street station and the neighborhood isn’t closing, Chowdhury said, the conversations that took place around it helped people understand how much trouble it brought the immediate neighbors, as well as how much others relied on the light rail.

She acknowledged that a recent focus on the Franklin and Lake light-rail stations may have pushed negative activity down to 46th.

“If you push people around without resources that help lift them out of the situation they’re in, they’re going to go to another place, absolutely,” Chowdhury said.