By Ted Kleine
In Chicago journalism you’re not a player unless you’ve caught an alderman, and StreetWise had finally bagged its trophy. The paper has been around for five years, but the Granato story was its first attempt at investigative journalism. Frago had discovered the campaign contributions while researching how rising rents in West Town–especially in its Wicker Park pocket–have shunted poor Latinos out of the neighborhood, in some cases into homeless shelters.
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The story ran in the first issue overseen by editor Brendan Shiller, who was hired as an associate editor last February. Since taking over in May, he has transformed StreetWise from an innocuous newsletter for the homeless into a journal of urban politics. Six months ago, StreetWise looked like a dreary community-college paper, with outsize black-and-white photos and a sloppy layout. Its news columns were dominated by vendor autobiographies, reviews of greasy spoons, and features on SRO hotels. Interesting to the homeless maybe, but most of the paper’s customers were buying it out of charity.
Shiller, who grew up in an apartment near Montrose and Broadway, says he saw homeless people every day just walking around his neighborhood, including families who camped out in cars in a nearby vacant lot. “I distinctly remember two of those cars, one of them a station wagon, a family living in there–a grandfather, a mother, a father, and two kids.” In 1988 that lot became a tent city, temporary home to several hundred homeless people protesting the city’s unwillingness to build low-cost housing in Uptown. When the police arrived to clear it out, Shiller’s mother, who was by then an alderman, was one of four people arrested.
After unsatisfying stints as a stringer for the Chicago Tribune and as a waiter at Leona’s, Shiller joined StreetWise, then was promoted to editor after his predecessor, Lisa Ely, resigned to take a job at a gospel music magazine in Los Angeles. “Brendan takes us deeper into the precipitants of homelessness,” says executive director Anthony Oliver, who hired Shiller. “For example, public policy, how that creates homelessness. I think he helped strengthen our pursuit. I wanted to cut deeper into the issues so that our readers would be able to understand the realities of the city.”
