For months, Trahern Crews has been going where the votes aren’t — corners of St. Paul’s North End and East Side where he says many low-income residents are still unaware there’s a mayoral election in November.

As far as he’s concerned, those are his people.

Borrowing a page from the Civil Rights era, he likens himself to “the poor people’s candidate” for St. Paul mayor — an urban environmental crusader who would boost the minimum wage to $15 without exception, freeze rent prices as well as property taxes, and force the police to carry their own liability insurance.

In his youth mentoring, urban farming and anti-violence work, he sometimes joins with others, or operates alone, under the advocacy title “Black St. Paul,” but not all his stances have gone over well with St. Paul’s black leaders. At a recent public hearing before the St. Paul City Council, Crews was the only black person to argue against new restrictions for menthol sales.

Why not ban menthol from convenience store shelves altogether? Because proceeds from those sales, he said, could be put into a special account — the “Rondo Municipal Fund of St. Paul” — at a city-run bank that could become a national model for slavery reparations.

Crews, who has been active with Black Lives Matter St. Paul, is thinking federally: new taxes on tobacco, sugar and cotton could help boost year-round youth internships and jobs programs for the black community in St. Paul, and everywhere.

Then there’s the solar district he envisions. When Crews was growing up in St. Paul’s Summit-University neighborhood, a neighbor with a conservationist bent showed hiim his first solar panels when he was just a kid. Crews wants entire East Side streets powered by the sun — another way St. Paul can become a national model for urban sustainability.

MAN VS. VAN

As campaign platforms go, the former music producer has a giant vision, and it’s already been dealt a giant blow. On Aug. 1, the first day to file candidacy papers in the mayor’s race, Crews was bicycling from his North End home toward his workplace — a Hamline-Midway charter school — to weed and water its youth garden plots.

He recalls making eye contact at a stop sign with the driver of a St. Paul Parks and Recreation van. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, his backpack, cellphone and bike splayed across the intersection, a softball-sized hernia welt poking out of his stomach.

“The handle bars must have hit me,” said Crews, who underwent surgery the same day and then spent four days in the hospital. When he woke up, he’d lost his job as an urban farmer and youth mentor with T.R.U.T.H Preparatory Academy, which folded in August after a year in operation.

As a result of the accident, he’s filing a claim against the city. Whatever campaign door knocking or fundraising he may have once envisioned is pretty much on hold. There are a few “Crews for St. Paul” T-shirts in the community, but there may not be any “Crews For Mayor” lawn signs this season.

Crews, who ran for St. Paul City Council in 2015 with the Green Party endorsement, is in it alone this time, boosted by a small committee of family and friends. The official Green Party candidate in the mayor’s race is Elizabeth Dickinson, whom Crews said he has had little to no contact with.

His son Andre Oliver, who is his campaign manager, recently left the area to enroll in a master’s program in environmental science at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

In 2015, Crews’ understated campaign for the Ward 1 council seat earned 14 percent of the vote, compared with incumbent Council Member Dai Thao’s 84 percent.

At the time, Crews rented a home on Victoria Street from Melvin Carter III, who had represented the Frogtown, Summit-University and Union Park neighborhoods on the city council before Thao.

Now, all three men are in the mayor’s race, which has drawn 10 candidates. Crews said his cousin, former St. Paul NAACP Chair Nathaniel Khaliq, has endorsed Carter first and Crews second in the ranked-choice election. On the Nov. 7 ballot, voters will be allowed to rank up to six candidates in order of preference.

WIDE-RANGING POLITICS

Crews, who grew up in St. Paul’s Summit-University neighborhood, lost an older brother to violence when he was just a child, an experience that colors his activism. Under the title #BlackTruce, Crews led rallies and marches last year against black-on-black crime.

On “The Maximus Report,” his former cable access show, he used to call himself a “hip-hop activist,” but he said he’s mostly outgrown the title.

Beyond that, his politics are sometimes hard to pin down. He opposed the Major League Soccer stadium in the Midway because of its property tax exemptions. He’s skeptical of city efforts to organize trash collection — in this instance, Crews favors the free market.

He’s also skeptical of the city’s vision for redeveloping the Ford Motor Co. site in Highland Park, which he worries will face too many traffic problems.

If 20 percent or more of the Ford site is designated for affordable housing, he wonders how those low-income workers will access jobs in the region without massive investments in transportation options.

On his Facebook page, The Black Independent Mayoral Candidate, Crews calls St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman’s technology and jobs Innovation Cabinet “a work of genius.”

“I like Chris Coleman. I think he’s a good guy,” Crews said. “There’s just a couple of things I don’t agree with — raising property taxes by 23 percent? They think that’s equity? I don’t think that’s equity. Incomes in black households have dropped.”

RELATED: St. Paul mayor’s race candidate profiles

When it comes to proposals like freezing rents and property taxes, where does Crews expect to get the money to run the city? Labor, transportation and materials costs go up each year. But Crews said he’s found a way.

He points to the Frank Baker case, which in March resulted in a record $2 million payout to settle a case of alleged police misconduct. Baker, who had been sitting alone in his car on East Seventh Street near Hazel Street, was thrown to the ground and kicked in the ribs by officers while a police dog chewed his leg to the bone for 70 seconds.

If St. Paul police officers carried their own liability insurance, those costly legal settlements would be covered by the cops, he said, instead of St. Paul taxpayers, and serve to make officers more accountable.

“We want the police to carry insurance, just like doctors carry insurance,” said Crews, who leads with that argument when he meets potential constituents. “A lot of times, I don’t get to go past that. It’s like, ‘We’re voting for you!’ ”

TO KNOW MORE

For profiles of other candidates and news from the St. Paul mayoral race, go to TwinCities.com/StPmayor.