ANDERSON — A vacant field that once housed a bustling Delco Remy plant transformed into a cardboard-jungle shanty town Friday night.

The rows of clumsily built cardboard homes stood as a reminder of the plight of area homeless families.

Reality Check, an event hosted by two area homeless advocacy agencies, was designed to give participants a chance to sleep outside in the cold and experience homelessness for a night.

Participants were not disappointed.

The night air plunged to a biting 42 degrees as more than 150 participants bundled in blankets and knit caps huddled around rusted barrels filled with fire.

From Scatterfield Road, the event resembled the tent cities that have popped up around the nation as foreclosures hit all-time highs and unemployment continues its disturbing climb.

Though the most sprawling and populated tent cities have been discovered in places like Sacramento, California, a small homeless encampment was discovered in Anderson this summer.

“Tent City,” as it was called, was located along the White River near Jackson and Fifth streets.

It was discovered by police when a homeless man living in a tent was burned while sleeping.

The encampment included three tents, a makeshift cooking area with a smoldering fire and a dog tied to a tree.

By all appearances, it was a campsite. But the wooded area near the river was soon cleared and its homeless residents assisted indoors by area homeless agencies.

Event organizers estimated Friday that, on any given night, there are 220 local residents in need of a place to sleep.

Some end up sleeping outside along river banks, under bridges or in makeshift shanty towns like the one replicated Friday.

The discovery of Tent City was Anderson resident Teresa Martin’s first inkling that Madison County had a homelessness problem.

Martin and her husband, Jeff, bundled in thick blankets and slept in a cardboard box as part of the Reality Check event along Scatterfield Road.

Preparing to climb into her box for the night, Teresa Martin said she was in awe.

“I could not imagine people having to live like this year round,” she said.

Participants like the Martins were not only treated to a taste of homelessness with the cardboard accommodations, but slept amongst actual homeless men from the Christian Center.

The men ladled chili into plastic foam bowls as participants stood in a soup line provided by the local Catholic community.

It was a role reversal meant to have an impact on participants as they looked actual homeless people in the eye, hammering the point of the event home.

Daniel Wohlberg of the Christian Center said the center hosts a soup line three times a day and serves 7,000 meals a month.

It costs the center 53 cents per meal, and it receives no government funding.

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s donors that make this function,” he said.

In October, the Christian Center went public with its financial troubles — a $200,000 deficit.

A story published in The Herald Bulletin in October described the situation. Christian Center Executive Director Scott Richards said the center worked with a budget of about $843,000 the last fiscal year but brought in only about $643,000 in donations. He blamed much of the lessened donation on the economy.

While the Martins reflected on their own good fortune in being employed and able to afford a home, others appeared to have found the event less than sobering.

College students and children bounced around the encampment clapping and singing songs learned at summer camp. Others did cartwheels over yellow police tape and slid down the small ditch in the field on their sleeping bags, seemingly oblivious to the real homeless men and women who’d bedded down for the night.

For them, it wasn’t make-believe.

They’d given up their spot at the local homeless shelters to volunteer to organized the event.

Sliding into the flimsy cardboard structures and pulling blankets tighter around them as the night air turned a bitter cold, they revisited the nights when they’d been unable to find shelter.

For Jimmy Schuster, a third-year resident of the Christian Center, it was a handful of nights under an Indianapolis bridge.

Mayor Kris Ockomon participated in the event by sleeping in a small box structure.

In Anderson, he said, homeless people have been found sleeping under the Eisenhower Bride, in vacant wooded areas and in various parts of Edgewater Park.

He expressed hope that the event would spur donors to support Anderson’s homeless population by providing funding to the Christian Center and Alternatives Inc., which provides shelter for homeless women.

Mary Jo Lee of Alternatives said the shelter housed 331 people last year — 94 of them were children.

As the economy continues to struggle, she said, places that serve the homeless are seeing an increase in demand and a decrease in resources.

After a Christian concert and informative program about the homelessness problem in Anderson concluded, participants were left to circle barrels of fire, their hands hovering over the small fires as the supply of wood was depleted.

Some who’d tried to sleep in their boxes but found it impossible gave up on the hope for sleep and spent the night sitting in camp chairs dangerously close to fires that grew smaller by the hour.

At 4 a.m., about one dozen of the sleepless participants stirred in the vast field of brown cardboard and smoking barrels.

It was only one night, and it was voluntary, but unable to sleep in such meager conditions with no hope of finding shelter, they seemed to have gotten the point.

Contact Brandi Watters 640-4847, brandi.watters@heraldbulletin.com.