News

An Interview with Dan Kerr

Aired July 11, 2001

Dan Kerr is with the local activist group, Food Not Bombs, which advocates for homeless and low income families struggling to make ends meet. He's also a friend of Educardo Lauriano and Pamela Wagner, and has had the chance to observe their situation first hand.

April Baer–How did you first run across Ed and Pam?

Dan Kerr–Actually, I first met them on Public Square. They came down and were selling the homeless grapevine and I talked to them about that. And really when I first started to get to know them though was the camp-out on Public Square in '99 when we were protesting the arrest of the homeless for being homeless during that Christmas season. They were two of the folks that got arrested and we tried to make a commitment saying that we were all there together and we are going to make sure we are with you through the hearings and going back and forth to the hearings and picking him up, and that is when we got to know each other more closely.

AB–Would you say their story is a success story?

DK–It would be hard to say it was a success story. I would say they have really struggled and I think, in a sense, that we have to give them a lot of credit for the fact that they have been able to manage in some sense as well as they have. There is a certain level of success [they've achieved] and at the same time they have also gone through a whole lot of traumas and difficulties in the past year so certainly not happily ever after type of story.

AB–Do you think there is such a thing as "happily ever after" for homeless people?

DK–No, I think this is one of the problems and one of the reasons why - when I first met them they first had a place to stay in Slovak Village, and that place was condemned while they were living there and so they were put back on the street to become homeless again. And that is a very typical story because when people are trying to pull themselves up out of the shelters they are really relying on the bottom of the housing market, and that housing is the most vulnerable housing. There is not, right now, real stable affordable housing stock that people can depend on. So often times things like that do happen where people pull themselves up and end up being housed, and the landlord may not be paying their bills or their taxes or fixing the place, and the land lord may be going through their own economic difficulties or may just be trying to exploit the people and they end up back on the street. So it is certainly not at the point where we can say Pam and Eduardo are in the clear, they are not going to end up back in the street. I would hope that is the case but I think they are in more in a typical situation that a lot of people in the city are living in the sense that they are proverbial one pay check away from being homeless.

AB–Do you think the whole Camelot ordeal really proved anything? Do you think the people who are living there got something out of the str