Jazzalyn Baker’s migraines got worse when she moved to the Southport neighborhood on St. Paul’s West Side four years ago.
Baker, the mother of three young boys, said migraines used to be an occasional problem. These days, she gets them regularly. She finds herself cleaning black residue off her windows, wondering if the neighborhood she lives in is safe for her boys. One of her sons has asthma, and his flare ups became more frequent when they moved to Southport.
“I find myself going to urgent care constantly,” Baker told Sahan Journal.
Baker joined neighbors and organizers from the West Side Community Organization on a tour of Southport on a sunny October afternoon. They wanted to give state, county and local officials a look into their lives in a neighborhood that often goes overlooked.
Southport is located on the banks of the Mississippi River. The neighborhood was once home to the West Side Flats, where Minnesota’s early Mexican American community settled. In the 1960s, roughly 2,000 residents were displaced when St. Paul tore down the flats to build the Riverview Industrial Park.
That industrial legacy lingers. Southport residents today are boxed into a portion of the city near the St. Paul Downtown Airport and an industrial park by Highway 52. There’s only one way for vehicles to enter and exit the neighborhood, on Robie Street, and trucks coming from the highway to the industrial park constantly rumble through and back up traffic.
Miguel Brito with the West Side Community Organization grew up in the neighborhood and spent his childhood in the pews Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church. When he joined the neighborhood group as a community organizer in 2025, he learned about state data showing that pockets of the West Side, including Southport, suffer from poor air quality.
So, he began knocking on doors in Southport and talking with neighbors about what they were experiencing. The West Side Community Organization started tabling on sidewalks to hear more from residents.
“They’re the ones who have the solutions. They’re the ones who deal with this everyday,” Brito said.
Neighbors felt validated through conversations with community organizers, and realized their concerns weren’t unique.
“That’s when the gates opened and everyone felt seen and heard,” Baker said.
‘Levers of accountability’
Baker joined Brito and other community members on a tour of the neighborhood starting from Our Lady of Gaudalupe off Highway 52. The crowd included residents, local politicians and staff members from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
They trudged along the scant sidewalk available along Highway 52, where speakers’ words were often drowned out by noisy trucks.
The primary industrial site in the area is a metal recycling scrapyard facility owned by EMR, a British firm that purchased Northern Metals, a local company. Northern Metals is a metal recycling company with a history of environmental violations at its scrapyard in North Minneapolis, where neighbors organized a campaign that led the state to order it to stop shredding metal at the site.
The EMR scrapyard attracts a host of large diesel powered trucks daily. That creates unsafe traffic conditions and health concerns, explained Southport resident Chloe Krenz. Often, trucks are backed up, waiting to turn left into the scrapyard.
“We’re dealing with the noise, exhaust and air pollution that comes from all these trucks idling,” Krenz said.
The facility also attracts a group of freelance metal scrappers, who pull up with trailers full of junk they hope to sell. Rejected items are often strewn across the neighborhood, and spare screws and nails frequently puncture tires.
The West Side Neighborhood Organization is soliciting ideas from neighbors for how to improve road safety, better accommodate pedestrians and decrease traffic backups. They’d also like to study adding a new access point to the neighborhood, and create ways to document and cite local industry for emitting excessive dust and pollution.
They contacted the St. Paul Port Authority and Ramsey County. They helped push for a new ordinance on dust control at the St. Paul City Council that is currently making its way through the committee process, and seems to have broad support, Brito said.
“We’re going to create levers of accountability,” he said.
Earlier this month, residents delivered a letter to the managers of the EMR plant. They’ve yet to hear back. The westsiders are hoping to enter a productive dialogue with EMR, Brito said. They don’t want to be too antagonistic, but they want to push for better conditions.
Company representatives did not respond to requests for comment from Sahan Journal.
“We hope that we hear back from them. It’s in good faith. We want to have conversations with people,” Brito said.
