© 2024 WLRN
MIAMI | SOUTH FLORIDA
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Belle Glade Farmworker Housing Residents Cautiously Optimistic Of New Property Manager

Allen Eyestone
/
Palm Beach Post
Dorothy McCloud, 68, talks about her experience living in Okeechobee Center, Monday in Belle Glade, Dec. 16, 2019. She has lived there since 1969. The Belle Glade Housing Authority will be managed by a third-party property manager starting Jan. 1.

BELLE GLADE — A stone’s throw from Dorothy McCloud’s house are fields of sugarcane, which is the reason why she keeps rat poison on hand. Whenever the crop is burned before harvesting, the rodents scurry from the fields and into nearby buildings and homes.

It may take a few days for a response, she said, if she complained about the rats to the Belle Glade Housing Authority, which manages the 714 units within the Okeechobee and Osceola centers on behalf of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But McCloud, 68, couldn’t recall how long it had been since she told management about the broken bathtub tile that had fallen on her foot, or that she needed a new front door.

But things abruptly changed when one family’s living conditions at the Okeechobee Center became news this summer, she said.

Read more at palmbeachpost.com

More On This Topic