We live downtown in a small city of 700 people. While not the busiest city, it does have traffic and sometimes not so nice people. We also live behind main street, where there is some commerce. As a result, we built a cattery to house the stray cats that we adopted. 
Our cats range in age from four to ten. They have the inside back 8x10 foot of a building. They can also go outside as they wish to almost 900 square feet of kennel area that is fenced and covered with bird netting. We have grassy areas, ground cover, shrubs and flowers planted for them. I will go into detail in a different post about what plants we have found useful.
At first, it was hard for us to pen them up. Tom and I grew up where cats are never collared or penned. Cats just come and go as they please. But, except for Dobbie, all the cats thought the pen was great. Dobbie liked to hunt and had a large range he traveled. The entire first year he was in the pen he sat in the catnip patch both stoned and pouting.
Now he thinks it is great to be in there. The two oldest cats, Onslow and Emmett, prefer the cattery and will decline chances to go out into the real world. Toula, the calico, thinks the cattery is great. She was two years old before she had a chance to go outside at all. The cattery is all she wants to know about. The cattery is five years old now. We had to rearrange some of the interior to accommodate older cats who cannot jump as high. 
December 11, 2007 most of the outside fencing was damamged in an ice storm. The cats had a much smaller area to wander in for the winter. However, the next spring we increased the size of the outside area from 720 square feet to the current size of 900 square feet
