Apparently the route was finalized, but then, within days after announcing that federal stimulus money would solve funding problems and let them expand the 19th-Avenue route even further, they decided they didn’t have any money after all, and so whooops! Everything was put on hold.

While on “hold,” however, they continued to rip out houses, possibly because they had contracts with the demolition people. Many of the houses had already been bought out from under owners, at rock-bottom prices.

The reason they’re ripping out our neighborhood is that 19th isn’t wide enough to accommodate the rail up the middle without widening. Everywhere else, they’ve ripped out the properties on the west side. Large swaths of the strip between 19th Avenue and the I-17 are gang-infested slums, while properties on the east side are somewhat less blighted and in many areas much healthier.

Along our stretch, however, the west side is built up with tenements — slum apartments the City allowed to go in about 25 years ago, without bothering to enlarge the school and so turning what was then one of the best schools in the central city into one that is tactfully classified as “a problem school.”

Apartments, of course, are businesses. In a developer-friendly, resident-unfriendly city like Phoenix, businesses trump homeowners every time. So at Northern they switched the teardowns from the west side of the road to the east side, meaning they ripped out single-family homes instead of run-down, dangerous apartment buildings (where cops get shot and killed when they’re not safely hovering overhead in helicopters).

We asked that the City construct a wall along 19th to block noise and blight, by way of salvaging what we could of our neighborhood’s quality of living and property values. Metro workers went through the motions of conducting a poll — with questions that were meaningless and misleading and which, claims to the contrary, was never seen by many residents — and then announced the results said homeowners didn’t want it.

So that’s the story there.

You understand, the agenda is not the one advertised — that lightrail is a fine thing for the city and its residents. The agenda is to enrich the developers who put people into elected and appointed positions at City Hall, something that is fairly easy to do now with a defanged press that has laid off its investigative reporters and no longer covers local politics in any effective way.

How funny that people grutch over the route along an existing rail corridor! Hereabouts, people complain that there was no reason NOT to have used the existing rail corridors, of which there are several. And that it was ridiculous not to have run it along the already blighted freeway corridors, so carefully planned to accommodate commuters who were induced to move to the sprawling suburbs (which enriched some more — or in many cases the same — developers). Can’t win, eh?