Last month, I described the plight of those living in the 4300 block of Stevens Avenue South, a neighborhood literally on the slide, thanks to some unexpected troubles during the massive 35W reconstruction project. Jake Weyer at the Southwest Journal spoke to neighbors about what it’s like living on this eroding frontage road. The Minnesota Department of Transportation is predicting that life on the block will stabilize by the end of the summer.

The federally-fueled demolition push in St. Paul and Minneapolis that Whistleblower has been blogging about house by house got some big-picture treatment, thanks to reporting by my colleague Chris Havens.

The numbers are striking: Minneapolis is planning to knock down 150 homes in the next 18 months, up from 34 in 2006, while St. Paul wants to raze between 90 and 130 buildings this year. Altogether, the cities demolished 369 houses from 2006 to 2008. A typical street in the Minneapolis grid has 14-15 homes on each side, so if all these homes were adjacent to each other, the flattened area is the equivalent of 12 city blocks. That’s a big jump for recent years, but as a planning expert points out in Havens’ story, it follows in the footsteps of the massive demolitions that accompanied “urban renewal” and highway construction in the 1950s, 1960s, and the late 1970s through the early 1980s.

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Add the 4300 block of Stevens Avenue South in Minneapolis to the continuing collateral damage from the reconstruction of the Crosstown/35W (see earlier installments here, here and here). WCCO’s Esme Murphy beat Whistleblower to this story. But only Tuesday did I receive the Feb. 2 engineering report from the city of Minneapolis about the troubles on Stevens Avenue. Those details, along with a conversation I had last month with John Griffith of the Minnesota Department of Transportation, paint a vivid picture of what happened.

Early this winter, work crews were busy laying a 36-inch water main in the cavernous trench created by the widening 35W in south Minneapolis. They were digging so deep that to keep the site dry, they had to pump out the groundwater. This “dewatering” apparently destabilized the earth all around it, including several houses on the 4300 block of Stevens.

In January, the trouble came to a head when a smaller water line that served the homes on Stevens sprung a leak and caused a small avalanche where the street used to be. Crews repaired that water line, but by then, the ground all around was moving. The city report, done by the Bonestroo engineering firm, concluded that “the area is undergoing a classic global slope stability failure.”

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My Sunday column described the bumpy course of homeownership for newlyweds Mike and Mary Gustafson, thanks to some unpleasant discoveries about their new home in Crystal. Also this weekend, I wrote about what happens to Metro Transit bus drivers when they’re caught driving drunk off-duty. It came as a surprise to me that for other traffic violations, Metro Transit has treated them no differently off-duty or on-duty - it’s up to the driver to deal with the consequences of a ticket for running a red light, speeding, etc. A Metro Transit task force convened in the wake of its alleged on-the-job drunken driving incident is likely to change that policy, I was told.

Whistleblower is off-duty this week on spring break. I’ll return on Monday, April 13. If your news tip can’t wait, call Kate Parry at (612) 673-4678 or send her an email.