Disorder is a brake on neighborhoods and businesses. They need more help.

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Angie Vig sat in her cozy, sunlit guitar shop, looking wistfully out over busy Snelling Avenue and the neighborhood she clearly loves.

“A few years ago this wasn’t the case,” she said with a sigh. But now, with all the loitering, cheating and open drug use surrounding her store in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood, she and her husband, Ted, are considering moving their business elsewhere.

The Vigs are among dozens of neighbors and business owners frustrated by the increase in crime in their area. At recent community meetings, they have expressed these frustrations to law enforcement and elected officials, saying the global pandemic has ushered in an era of fentanyl addiction, unsheltered homelessness, property burglaries and loitering that is becoming so severe that it is deterring customers from patronizing their businesses.

Through law enforcement agencies, social service agencies, nonprofits, and others work On these issues, more needs to be done to get people off the streets and provide them with the resources they need – whether it’s housing, health care or help after they’ve been arrested for committing crimes.

Vig is a member of the Anishinaabe White Earth Band in Minnesota and believes she is the only indigenous person in the state and perhaps nationally to own a specialty guitar repair and sales company, Vig Guitars. Growing up just a stone’s throw from her business, she believed ten years ago that this was the perfect place to settle because of its central location, easy access and strong sense of community. She said many musicians — including students from nearby Hamline University — live in and near the neighborhood.

Her stretch of the Snelling Avenue commercial corridor between University Avenue and Thomas Street is lined with small businesses, and a small park sits in the corner of her store. Vig said there was a small encampment in the park during the summer, although it has since been cleared. She nodded her head toward a building across the street from Snelling, where one person was openly using drugs and the other sat with a pile of belongings.