Madonna's brother collecting cans, fearing winter

Anthony Ciccone, brother of Madonna, has significantly fewer homes than his sister.

If there's a good thing to come out of the story, it's that it does give a celebrity angle for the otherwise pretty-much-ignored homelessness crisis to force its way into the newspapers:

“My family turned their back on me, basically, when I was having a hard time,” he said. “You think I haven’t answered this kind of question a bazillion times — why my sister is a multibazillionarie, and I’m homeless on the street?”

“Never say never,” he said. “This could happen to anybody.”

“I don’t have any income, I’ve got to go collect bottles and cans, do odd jobs.”

Despite the uncommon community effort to help the homeless here, there are gaps, and Ciccone was among several locals who got cold-related injuries last winter.

“They can’t do everything all the time for everybody, they just don’t have the resources,” he said. “These people that run these things are all volunteers, they don’t get paid to do these things.”

It's unlikely that any other homeless person in Michigan would have been able to get the international press to show an interest in his story, and it's to Ciccone's credit that he's using the interest to talk about everyone that's caught in homelessness, and not just himself.