With gray skies hinting of rain, more than a half dozen people set out Monday morning in St. Paul, wearing purple vests and donning trash buckets and pincher tools.

Most were homeless, or recently without shelter. They had instructions to clear out litter from several Green Line light rail stations and bus stops throughout the Capitol city.

They earn weekly paychecks working for the St. Paul nonprofit Listening House under a pilot program launched earlier this year called St. Paul Work Now. At first, clean-up teams fanned out in St. Paul, picking up trash in sidewalks, skyways and parks, and shoveling snow during the winter.

Now, the program has been expanded to include picking up litter at Metro Transit Green Line stations in St. Paul, including the Robert Street, Capitol/Rice Street, Western Avenue, Dale Street, Victoria Street, Hamline Avenue and Snelling Avenue stations.

“It puts money in the pockets of people who need it and it helps make the city a little cleaner,” said Molly Jalma, Listening House’s executive director. “It’s a very practical solution.”

Crews also clean A Line arterial bus rapid transit stops at Snelling and University avenues and bus stops near Listening House’s new headquarters at East 7th Street and Lafayette Road (formerly Red’s Savoy Pizza).

For Metro Transit, the clean-up crews are part of a broader plan to make public transportation more welcoming, especially after ridership plunged during the pandemic, giving rise to hybrid work. Cleaner stations, stops, buses and trains were incorporated into the agency’s Safety and Security Action Plan, a strategy designed to make passengers feel safer, especially now as more people return to the office.

“Everyone who travels and works on our system deserves to have an experience that is consistently safe, clean, and welcoming,” Metro Transit General Manager Lesley Kandaras said.

Affordable housing is as big of an issue in the Twin Cities, where housing and rental costs have increased dramatically in the past decade, as in greater Minnesota, where limited availability of affordable housing is considered a central obstacle to economic development.

Minneapolis has one of the worst housing shortages in the country, according to a Zillow report earlier this year. And among economic development experts in greater Minnesota, it’s almost become a cliche: The problem isn’t a lack of rural or small-town jobs. It’s a lack of places for workers to live.

“It doesn’t matter where I travel in the state of Minnesota,” said Minnesota Housing Commissioner Jennifer Ho. “Everyone everywhere is talking about the fact that housing is a challenge. And this (tax credit program) is a really concrete way for people to participate in investing in more homes. This is a way for those who are saying ‘what can I do to help?’ to have a really significant and tangible way to invest.”

After the six-year program was passed by the Legislature, the program kicked off in October 2023. Taxpayers contributed some $7 million last year, which went to 23 projects statewide. More than a third of the projects were in greater Minnesota, and the vast majority of those were in towns with fewer than 2,500 people.

After a press conference Monday, Paul Williams, the president and CEO of Project for Pride in Living, led a tour of a 60-unit affordable housing complex, mostly workforce housing, in St. Louis Park that will open next month. It’s one of the two projects that Wernz had raised $165,000 for to purchase solar panels through the tax credit program.

The victim told police on Sept. 10 that Shelton had flirted with her during work shifts and scheduled her hours to align with when he managed the store. She said they had sexually charged late-night conversations.

The victim told police that Shelton pushed himself against her one day as she was cleaning coffee pots in a back room of the grocery store. She said Shelton also inappropriately touched her in his office and in her car.

The sexual assaults stopped when Shelton’s significant other learned about the relationship in 2021 and started texting the victim. The victim said she quit her job at this point, and did not hear from Shelton until Aug. 20 this year, two days before his arrest. In text messages reviewed by police, Shelton apologized and said he missed their friendship.

Police said Shelton admitted to the three assaults.

They had arrested Shelton on Aug. 22 after receiving word that he had been exchanging explicit messages with a different teenage cashier.

The previous victim told police that Shelton, her supervisor since she started working at the Market as a 14-year-old in 2022, had sexually assaulted her inside his office on the second floor of the store.