Selling magazines becomes a lifeline for Chicagoans navigating the intersecting barriers of incarceration, addiction, and housing instability.
For decades, Keith Hardiman heard the same answer when he tried to move his life forward: “You don’t qualify.”
After recovering from substance use disorder and returning home from prison, Hardiman discovered that social and legal barriers prevented him from securing steady work and stable housing.
“I’ve always heard this for the past 30 or 40 years—you don’t qualify,” Hardiman said. “I don’t know how it is that I don’t qualify. I’ve been to prison. I did my time. I won’t owe anyone… I need a roof over my head now.”
Hardiman has been standing on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Lake Street for more than 25 years selling copies of StreetWise, Chicago’s “street news magazine” that publishes solutions stories on equity and justice and stories documenting lived experiences of people facing homelessnessness and poverty.
On most mornings, Hardiman arrives by 6 a.m., selling magazines until about 10, and greeting commuters as the city wakes up around him.
Hardiman grew up in the Henry Horner Homes on Chicago’s West Side before his family moved to the South Side. He bounced between schools, served in the U.S. Army after high school, and trained as an auto mechanic. “I was getting by,” he said—until an arrest in his early adulthood led to six years in prison.
After his release, he discovered that jobs he was otherwise qualified for were now out of reach due to his legal record.
“It was damned if I do, damned if I don’t,” Hardiman said. “No matter what my work experience was… It was just the fact of the felony.”
Hardiman battled addiction, complicated by family struggles, including his mother’s death from breast cancer in 1998—when he was just 36. “That set me back a whole lot–my family problems. I was out in the streets for a while and had a drug addiction.” He said the past 30 years have been difficult.
But Hardiman got sober—and has stayed that way for roughly 25 years.
“One is too many and a thousand is never enough,” he said of addictive substances.
StreetWise became part of his life after he saw someone selling the paper on the street.
A vendor told Hardiman where the office was, and he went to an orientation—which lasted three days at the time. When he finished, the organization helped him get started with free copies to sell.
StreetWise vendors buy magazines at a discounted rate and sell them on the street, keeping the difference as income. The model allows people who are struggling to find traditional jobs to start earning money immediately.
Inside the headquarters, the environment more closely resembles a community center than a traditional office. Volunteers organize supplies, provide food, assemble hygiene kits, and help vendors access resources. Sarah Gentis helps organize wellness programs, distribute supplies, and assist vendors whenever she visits Chicago.
“I really love the concept of StreetWise,” Gentis said. “It empowers people—especially people who might not be able to get a typical job.”
The organization also connects vendors with basic services: hygiene kits, food, clothing, and referrals to social services.
StreetWise adds stability to many lives, but the problem of homelessness and housing insecurity in Chicago remains daunting.
In Chicago, more than 58,000 people experienced homelessness in 2024, though official one-night counts recorded about 18,800 people living in shelters or on the street, highlighting how challenging it is to fully measure the crisis.
That gap reflects a broader truth: homelessness manifests in ways both visible and unseen–it is a system-wide issue shaped by housing, wages, and policy.
“Housing affordability and accessibility is the key issue,” said Dennis Culhane, a social policy professor who has studied homelessness for decades. “The underlying causal factor is a lack of affordable housing supply.”
As rents rise faster than incomes, more people are pushed into instability. For those already on the margins, even small disruptions—a job loss, a medical bill—can be enough to lose housing entirely.
Building community through visibility
Today Hardiman typically brings in around $50 a day.
It isn’t much, but it’s enough to afford a room at the Norford Hotel and a meal. Hardiman has grown to rely on regular customers who have come to recognize him over decades on the same corner.
For Hardiman, the most meaningful part of selling StreetWise is the people he meets. Each day brings conversations with a wide range of strangers, some of whom have gradually become regulars and even friends. When he’s absent from his usual corner, a few customers have been concerned enough to call the StreetWise office to make sure he’s okay—something he says makes him proud.
At times, the support goes beyond buying the magazine. One customer once paid for Hardiman to go to the movies after he mentioned he hadn’t been able to afford it.
He’s received Thanksgiving cards. A Valentine’s Day card. Small gestures that remind him people care.
But street life also brings uglier encounters. Hardiman says he has been spit on, had dirt thrown in his face, and been called racial slurs while selling papers downtown.
“I’ve been spit on. I’ve been had dirt thrown in my face, and I’ve been called the n-word in the middle of the street of Michigan and Lake Street,” Hardiman said. “The bad part about it is the ugly faces I get, where people come past, they scrunch up [their] face, they look like they’re disgusted. I respect the common courtesy, and want it back in return.”
Harassment, discrimination and violence are frequent experiences for people who are unhoused. A 2024 report on violence and victimization for people experiencing homelessness found that more than half of respondents experienced some form of discrimination or abuse on a weekly basis.
The real scale of housing insecurity
Founded more than 30 years ago, Streetwise is part of a global network of roughly 100 street newspapers, the International Network of Street Papers, that allow people experiencing homelessness or poverty to earn income by selling magazines.
Opportunities like these have become increasingly important as rates of homelessness continue to grow.
Nationally, more than 771,000 Americans were experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2024–the highest number ever recorded.
Experts say that number reflects not just individual hardship, but structural failures.
What Streetwise provides
For some vendors, StreetWise offers a concrete path to stability after years of unemployment, homelessness, or addiction. Andrew Allen knows that reality firsthand.
Allen grew up on Chicago’s South Side and graduated from Morgan Park High School before a desire to travel took him to Miami in his early twenties—where his addiction began to take hold. He later became homeless for several years, including about three years living on the beach, at times feeling unable to leave. Even when he had money or help to return home, he says, “I was trapped there,” using drugs instead.
“I was shooting drugs… the more I bought, the more I used,” Allen said. “It became so addictive that I preferred to buy drugs than to pay rent.”
He describes addiction as something outsiders often misunderstand, especially how it can obscure its own consequences. “They say, why don’t you quit? But it’s not that easy… You can’t even see that drugs are making you homeless.”
Allen struggled with addiction and had a criminal record, making traditional jobs difficult to obtain.
But StreetWise offered a fresh path. There was no background check required to begin selling the paper. Instead, vendors receive training and can begin working almost immediately.
Over time, Allen stabilized his life, eventually moving into a leadership role as a field supervisor, helping train new vendors and supporting them on the streets.
“Becoming a field supervisor changed my life,” he said. “It gave me the ability to give back to the community I came from.”
Allen now mentors new vendors who are trying to rebuild their lives. “If anybody hears this,” he said, “I want them to know there’s a way up and out of whatever situation you’re in.”
The systems behind the struggle
While stories like Hardiman’s and Allen’s often get framed as personal journeys, advocates say they are shaped by larger forces.
“The number one structural driver that creates the conditions of homelessnes is racism,” said M. Nelson, a policy manager at the Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness.
That racism shows up in housing policy–from redlining to the demolition of public housing like Cabrini-Green without full replacement. It also shapes who has access to homeownership — and who builds generational wealth.
“It’s not that there’s a lack of housing,” Nelson said. “It’s a lack of access.”
In Chicago, more than 109,000 housing units sat vacant in 2024—nearly double the roughly 58,000 people who experienced homelessness that year. At the same time, wages lag behind rents — with estimates suggesting a worker would need roughly $22 an hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment. Rents have climbed significantly faster than median wages in Chicago, leaving many working-class residents squeezed even as they earn more than they did a decade ago.
“There’s no one path”
The lack of access to safe, affordable housing impacts people across varying sustems–from people aging out of foster care to returning citizens, as well as families facing eviction.
“There’s no one path,” Nelson said. “We all make choices that have consequences, but we’re not all given the same choices to begin with. People experiencing homelessness are often starting from a place without a safety net, where even small decisions can have much bigger consequences.”
Research backs that up. Families with young children, for example, are among the most likely to enter shelters, in part because childcare costs and lost income strain already tight budgets.
Housing subsidies, often called vouchers, have been shown to reduce homelessness and improve outcomes across the board — from mental health to children’s education. Helpful but limited resources exist for returning citizens and foster youth. Food, shelter, mental health care, and emergency assistance referrals can be accessed 24/7 through 211 Metro Chicago.
“The most important mitigating factor against homelessness is having a housing subsidy,” Culhane said. “Only about a quarter of eligible households receive one.”
StreetWise offers access to meals, clothing, hygiene items, referrals to housing, jobs, healthcare and legal aid, help with ID and benefits, basic technology and mailing access, and crisis support for people in immediate need.
“We know how to end homelessness if we’re willing to devote the resources,” said Vanderbilt Professor of Human and Organizational Development Beth Shinn, who has studied homelessness for decades.
City of disparities
Since 2005, StreetWise Editor-In-Chief Suzanne Hanney has led the magazine’s newsroom, focusing on issues like housing, economics, and social inequality. Hanney attempts to make complex stories accessible to audiences from all kinds of backgrounds.
StreetWise stories explore the structural forces that shape poverty and homelessness in Chicago.
According to Hanney, a major reason for homelessness in the city is the city’s rising cost of living. Chicago has grown increasingly expensive, with many residents’ incomes insufficient to pay rent.
“We’ve become a divided city. We have a lot of higher end paying jobs, and so the city is gentrified. It’s more expensive,” Hanney said.
Housing affordability in Chicago is shaped by a widening gap between incomes and rent levels across the metro area. Census data reports the median household income in the Chicago metro exceeds $75,000, with significant variation across neighborhoods and a large share of households earning well below that level.
At the same time, affordability thresholds are set by Area Median Income (AMI), which the City of Chicago uses to define eligibility for housing programs. Under this system, households at 30% AMI are considered extremely low income and qualify for the deepest subsidies, with income limits set by household size and updated annually by the city.
Measuring gentrification
Even as these income benchmarks remain relatively fixed, rental affordability has continued to erode. Research from the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University shows that Chicago has experienced a long-term decline in the share of rental units affordable to lower-income households, as rents rise faster than incomes and units in many neighborhoods shift from affordable to market-rate. Together, these trends mean that even households earning at or near lower-income thresholds—such as 30% AMI—face a shrinking supply of housing they can realistically afford, intensifying pressure on renters across much of the city.
StreetWise’s readership, meanwhile, tends to come from Chicago’s more affluent neighborhoods, including Lincoln Park, Hyde Park and communities along the North Shore.
That dynamic creates an unusual connection: people with resources buying magazines from people who are struggling—and learning about the issues affecting them.
“The mission is to give them employment, respect, dignity,” Hanney said, “but also to tell their story.”
The fight for access continues
For Hardiman, the impact of StreetWise extends beyond the stories printed in the magazine. Much of it plays out on the sidewalk where he sells it.
Each morning he greets commuters, regular customers and pedestrians. Some walk past. Others stop to talk. After more than two decades on the same corner, many know him by name.
Hardiman continues to look for ways to build stability. Now 64, he is trying to secure Supplemental Security Income and searching for an affordable apartment.
Even now, the same barriers remain. His legal record limits housing options (despite legislation passed to prevent this form of discrimination), and rising rents make even modest units out of reach.
“People who are experiencing homelessness are our neighbors,” Nelson said. “They are community members… That experience doesn’t change that.”
Still, Hardiman returns to his corner each morning, magazine in hand. Selling StreetWise has given him a way to earn money—and a routine that keeps him moving forward.