Awww, just take the cat Johnny if the owners turn out to be negligent ones. Oh, and a bag of dry cat food is pretty cheap.
I have 2 strays I feed. One I've fed for a 5 years and she's got a decent shelter outside now. Over the years I've built upon it, i.e, first it was just this cloth, fake-fur-lined kitty "igloo" that is meant to be an indoor thing because it can't get wet, but it's all I could find at the time. Then over the years I've added cinderblocks and a piece of foam that works as a roof to keep out the rain and snow. Last year I found an outdoor heating device that now sits below the floor of the igloo. And also this year the foam roof has been replaced by a bigger one, so she should be able to completely say dry in there now, and mostly out of the wind as well. It's the best that can be done outside.
I'd so love if she'd just walk inside one day, I'd close the door and she'd never be allowed out until the spring LOL. It's just so cold out there, it's hard after 5 or so years to try to provide for a stray outside, you end up worrying about it all the time. And not just the cold can hurt a stray cat, other animals and even hateful people can as well.
for instance, today around 4:00pm I opened the front door and saw my 2 stray cats sitting there on my porch waiting to be fed. So I feed them and then went back to watching the movie I was watching on TV. About 5 minutes later I hear this hound dog bellow outside the front door LOL, and I'm like OMG! some dog is out there scaring and possibly threatening my strays! I run to the door, tear it open, and there is this really large white spotted beagle dog standing at the bottom of the porch steps barking at a now really puffed up stray (and retarded btw) cat. No owner anywhere in sight near it.
Luckily at the time one of my neighbors, who has two dogs and is a dog lover, saw the situation as she was walking her own dogs across the street, and actually chased that beagle down a few streets before she caught up with it and got the address from its collar. Heh, it also had on one of those shock collars (you can tell them because the collar will have a plastic looking rectangle box attached to it)? You know, the one that is supposed to keep your dog in your yard with "invisible fencing" using shock? Well it doesn't apparently always work, and think about it. If your dog just decides to take the maximum zap, to escape, if later said dog wants to come back home? Err, doesn't it have to encounter the same shock barrier again? If so, I'd imagine the dog would not want to go through it, and now the shock barrier is doing the opposite that the owners intended -- it is now keeping your own dog out of your yard!