Wednesday, December 19 2007 @ 05:27 AM PST Infoshop News
Affordable housing and homeless advocate Jamie "Bork" Loughner has chained herself to a bulldozer this morning at the B.W. Cooper housing complex in New Orleans. The government this week started demolishing buildings at the B.W. Cooper complex, which has 1000 buildings and is located across the highway from the Superdome. The city this week delayed demolition at three other complexes, but started demolishing B.W. Cooper over the objections of residents.
Loughner is a member of Mayday NOLA, an advocacy group for housing and the homeless, and she was a co-founder of the Common Ground Clinics.
In today's issue of the New York Times, critic Nicolai Ouroussoff argues against the demolition: "If the government gets its way, a rich architectural legacy will be supplanted by private, mixed-income developments with pitched roofs and wood-frame construction, an ersatz vision of small-town America. That this could happen in a city that still largely lies in ruins is both sad and grotesque." Ouroussoff concludes by arguing that the demolitions are a great travesty: "Blow after blow, in the name of progress. Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/arts/design/19hous.html
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