'In Their Shoes' event includes stop at soup line and a sweltering three-mile foot tour.

It was pushing way past 90 degrees Wednesday morning, when the half-dozen local leaders walked the same route most of Charlotte's homeless take each day to get to the Urban Ministry for a sandwich and bowl of soup.

Sweat soaked through their shirts, and ran down their faces.

Along the way, the six officials found homeless camps under a bridge at Interstate 277, and in woods within sight of uptown's skyscrapers. If the heat didn't make an impact on them, the toilets, piles of musty clothes and fresh cardboard on which to sleep, surely did.

"Seeing it on paper on a data sheet and seeing it in real life is a much different experience," said Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx. "You have families that were in their homes last night, got a padlock put on the door this morning, and they're in line at Crisis Assistance Ministry. That's a problem for all of us."

Their trek was three miles of uptown streets. It stretched from Crisis Assistance Ministry on Spratt Street, where each day hundreds of the working poor line up for help with rent and utilities, to the Urban Ministry at the north end of College Street, where the homeless go for a hot meal.

Wednesday's walking tour, sponsored by Piedmont Natural Gas and Goodrich, was part of a series of "In Their Shoes" events that Mecklenburg Ministries Executive Director Maria Hanlin leads several times a year. They give people a sense of what the homeless and impoverished face daily.

"These officials are all aware of poverty and are working on it," Hanlin said. "But with this walk, they were able to experience it from the inside. ... They were able to put a face on poverty."

Most of the leaders started the day catching a bus at 6:30 a.m. for uptown's transportation center, then had to figure out how to transfer by bus to Crisis Assistance.

Harold Cogdell Jr., Mecklenburg County Commission vice chair, got up early and walked. He was surprised to see so many people on the streets at that hour - who clearly had slept outside.

"When you're in the car and you're in that tunnel vision, it's amazing what you miss," Cogdell said. "They're engaging people. They want to know who you are, how you're doing and what brings you around.

"I understood clearly that we had a large homeless population in this county, but I didn't understand the magnitude until I saw the sheer number of people who were homeless or on the verge."

CMS Superintendent Peter Gorman was on the wrong side of the road to catch his bus, so he was late getting to Crisis Assistance.

He was greeted by a CMS employee, standing in line for help.

"He works for us 10 months out of the year, but has the summers off," Gorman said. "Now he's on the edge of being homeless. We as a society need to deal with that."

After the walk, he had a better idea of what nearly 4,000 homeless CMS students face.

"What an experience to see what our students go through," Gorman said. "How in the world do you come to school each day ready to learn, when you don't know where you're going to sleep that night?"

Principals and teachers, he said, must be mindful of what students go through outside school.

At lunch, the leaders sat with the homeless and listened to their concerns.

Some talked about how hard it is to serve prison time and then find a job.

Frank Hamrick told the mayor he'd done his time and now can't afford to buy his children a meal - much less rent an apartment for them to be together.

"I want to be responsible for my life now," Hamrick said. "I've already paid for what I've done in the past."