Palm Beach County officials are working with the city of Pahokee after 40 people, including families and children, were recently forced from a condemned apartment building.
The unsafe conditions documented at Parker Apartments included exposed wiring, a lack of electricity and running water.
Palm Beach County Mayor Sara Baxter told WLRN she is pushing for her office to assume increased oversight of code enforcement in the city.
"We are here to help with services at this point. It is not our jurisdiction," Baxter said. "We do give them $45,000 that go towards their code enforcement. This was so bad. We just want to make sure that our dollars are getting spent wisely."
Those funds come from a Community Development Block Grant, a federal program cities and counties often use for housing rehabilitation and infrastructure improvement.
Baxter is now working with the new Pahokee city manager, Brenda Bryant, and walked back earlier suggestions of pulling funds away if code enforcement issues weren't resolved.
" She tells us within the next few weeks they should be coming back with some changes," Baxter said. "And so we're gonna just keep in touch and stay updated."
Meanwhile, Baxter said all displaced Parker apartment residents have been re-housed.
People of Purpose, a nonprofit peer support organization led by founder and CEO William Freeman, helped 25 of 40 residents get settled.
Freeman told WLRN some of the residents are temporarily rehoused and will need more assistance.
He said local familiarity with the predominantly Black residents helped streamline the process of identifying those in distress, which helped the county act quickly.
"Individuals don't want to talk to people, unless they see a person that looked like them, that talked like them," Freeman told WLRN.
"So what we did was we made an opportunity to connect with all of those families to make sure that they had their birth certificates, their IDs."
Freeman said his organization is a "holistic reentry program," supporting people with chronic homelessness, substance abuse and economic issues, among other pressing concerns.
The organization was presented by Baxter with a county-wide proclamation on Thursday in Belle Glade, as it launched a first-of-its-kind reentry program serving the western Palm Beach County community.
Freeman said the apartment conditions are part a long list of cost of living and housing-related issues that need to be resolved in the area.
His organization aims to make systemic changes alongside providing emergency support services.
"What we'll do is be that roadmap by bringing financial seminars, bringing in job readiness seminars, bringing in anger management seminars, bringing in things that can help them build that person," Freeman said.
