If you build it, they won’t come.

A politician from Newark, New Jersey, built a six-foot, $45,000 fence around a public park in a last-ditch effort to solve the park’s worsening homelessness crisis – by keeping the vagrants out.

“The park was out of control,” East Ward Councilman Michael Silva told the Washington Post this week about Peter Francisco Park, which business owners and residents say had been turned into a drug den and an open-air vagrant campsite.

And so in June, Silva, a former Newark police detective, used taxpayer money to install a locked wrought iron fence around the problematic 4,000-square-meter green space. Local residents recall drug-addicted vagrants climbing the three monuments or using the site as an open-air toilet.

“This problem did not go away, it only grew and became more severe every day,” he said.

Currently, the only way to get into the park is to ask the city for permission.

Silva said his office will pass on the key to the park to people who want to organize events such as farmers markets or flea markets.

However, depending on the event, visitors may be required to pay the usual $500 permit fee as well as a $50 registration fee, according to the city’s parks department.

The drastic measure has so far met with mixed reviews.

Odette Martins, 45, works as an assistant in a doctor’s office a block down from the park. She said the city has effectively pushed the homeless into other nearby areas – including right outside her workplace.

“I’ve seen them outside my office, and they go to the bathroom in front of the church across the street,” she said. “It wasn’t like that before.”

Some commuters are now upset that they no longer have access to the park in the Ironbound district.

“When you wait for the bus, you (now) have to wait here in the sun,” said Tiffany Moultrie, 41, who used to have no problem standing in the shade of the park’s trees while waiting to get to her job at UPS.

“I appreciate that you are trying to beautify the city, but what about the people who live here?” she said.

And 40-year-old bus driver Kevin White sharply criticized the move, calling it “simply inhumane.”

The homeless “actually enjoyed the place and didn’t cause any trouble,” he claimed, despite the numerous complaints.

But Regina Donatangelo from Ironbound cheered for the fence.

“They made a mess there, it was dirty,” said Donatangelo, 54. “There were a lot of strange people there.”