Clock ticks for residents of Boca’s Dixie Manor
More than 300 to be displaced amid redevelopment
BOCA RATON — The first time Dixie Manor resident Angela McDonald spoke before the Boca Raton City Council, her message was clear.
“I told them that I am not a piece of garbage that you can just throw away,” she said.
She also insisted no one could dictate where she was going to live, or what she was going to do, she remembers telling them.
McDonald is one of Dixie Manor’s more than 300 residents who will be displaced in the coming months because of a redevelopment of the property. The project — Martin Manor, once it’s done — calls for the demolition and rebuilding of Dixie Manor, the federally subsidized housing complex off Glades Road at 1350 North Dixie Highway in Pearl City.
It was approved by the city council in a unanimous vote May 14. The city is not behind the project, though. The redevelopment comes from a collaboration between the city’s housing authority, whose members the council appoints, and Atlantic Pacific Communities, the developer. It will turn Dixie Manor’s 95 current one-story apartments into 95 new units spread across three, three-story buildings. Currently, there are 18 buildings.
McDonald, 58, has lived at her apartment for the past four years with her great-granddaughter, who is 4 years old, and her grandson, who’s 15. She came from Illinois, where her four children reside.
She has the opportunity to stay in the development after it is completed, but the process is long and complicated, something that most residents don’t have a grip on.
What’s the difference between public housing and affordable housing?
Currently, Dixie Manor is public housing known as Section 8, in which residents pay 30% of their monthly adjusted income as rent. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) covers the difference.
Martin Manor, however, will be affordable housing. There’s a difference between affordable housing and public housing.
Because the complex is being funded mostly by low-income housing tax credits, residents who want to move back in will have to apply to be certified to live there. Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) housing is a newer form of affordable housing ultimately overseen by the IRS, according to the National Center for Housing Management. It allows for residents to pay lower rents because developers of those communities have received private investments for their properties, in exchange for the federal tax credits.
Rent for Martin Manor apartments will still cost 30% of a resident’s income, Director of the Boca Raton Housing Authority Ashley Whidby said.
For residents wanting to move elsewhere, they can do so with Section 8 vouchers the housing authority has said it would give them. To apply for these vouchers for the residents, though, the housing authority needs HUD approval, which it doesn’t yet have.
Tequisha Myles, supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County, is working with McDonald and other Dixie Manor residents who want to stay. She is helping raise awareness about the residents’ rights and providing guidance on how to move forward.
“The whole challenge of having no guaranteed right to return, which is one of the things that we are hoping will happen, is that [residents] have to reapply,” she said.
It would require new background and credit checks to get residents ap
proved for LIHTC housing. And the clock is ticking — residents are expected to be out in the next three to four months.
With her grandchildren’s schooling in mind, McDonald is one of the 47 tenants who have expressed interest in remaining on-site during the construction of Martin Manor. She worked as an Uber driver until December, when she had an accident. Staying at Dixie Manor is her family’s most feasible option.
A residents council approved to examine what was unfolding
When she first moved to the property, McDonald kept to herself, she said. She’d go to work and come home, not really speaking to anyone in the community. But, one day, she overheard talk of redevelopment.
Wanting to learn more, she started sitting in on the housing authority’s board meetings. It was through those meetings that McDonald learned everything she knows now about Martin Manor. Others in the community, too, found out only by word of mouth. At the time, around 2021, McDonald said the housing authority had told residents they would not be able to return after redevelopment.
McDonald, in the midst of the confusion over the project at the time, created a residents council for Dixie Manor. At first, she faced pushback from the housing authority. They’d told her that, to get the council approved, the residents had to get certain things done — like clean up or address the ongoing pest control issue at the complex at the time.
McDonald said they were impossible tasks. For example, in order to address the issue of roaches, there was a policy at Dixie Manor in which an exterminator had to be called in. It couldn’t be addressed by the residents on their own.
Eventually, the issues of roaches and rats were addressed after McDonald and some other residents brought the issues into public light. It took around a year, she said.
The residents council was approved only in February, McDonald said. It’s led by four residents who meet with other members of the community monthly to discuss issues, the redevelopment project and resources as they navigate moving.
There was one housing board meeting, in particular, that McDonald remembers. The meeting came after a young man had been killed about 25 feet from her apartment and all three preachers in the community showed up to a packed house. She took it as a chance to share with others what she’d been hearing at housing board meetings — that residents could not move back in after the redevelopment.
“That’s when the alarm went out,” McDonald said. “After the community started coming into the board meetings, that’s when it changed.”
In March, the Legal Aid Society posted a video to YouTube featuring McDonald
alerting the public of the displacement of the community’s 95 tenants. In it, McDonald explained her situation and Myles expressed the importance of having affordable housing in Boca Raton and preserving Pearl City’s history. The video also said that only 45 of the 95 redeveloped units would be affordable housing.
Whidby, of the housing authority, called it inaccurate. But McDonald says that discussions about residents being able to return to Martin Manor came only after the video went up. So did the offer for residents to reside on the south side of the property until the new units open, which is what McDonald plans to do.
Martin Manor will include a museum to highlight Pearl City
The housing authority started bringing its lawyer to meetings after that, too. And it pulled back on telling residents they couldn’t return.
The housing authority is waiting on environmental clearance, Whidby said. Once that clearance is HUD-approved, the housing authority can apply for those Section 8 vouchers for residents. Part of the environmental review calls for some sort of preservation of the neighborhood’s history, she said. So, a lesson plan for local schools is in the works.
A museum in Martin Manor’s clubhouse also will display artifacts and have an oral history of Dixie Manor on display, Whidby said. The redevelopment, too, will be named after the Pearl
City resident, educator and activist Lois D. Martin.
“I just hope that the housing authority will keep the characteristics and dynamics,” Myles of the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County said of Dixie Manor, which has housed generations of families for 80 years in the historically Black neighborhood of Pearl City. Myles hopes the redevelopment will honor Pearl City’s legacy, she said.
Construction on the $20 million project is slated to start in January and is expected to take 18 months. Once completed, the property will feature a gym, computer lab, playground and the museum displaying artifacts, Whidby said. Because the redevelopment will have three-story buildings on the property’s north end, there’s a possibility of 95 additional apartments on the 10-acre site later on. But it would require additional funding and a second phase of redevelopment.
For now, McDonald and other residents are just trying to get a grip on where they will be living in the next year.
“We have people sitting on the Housing Authority Board that haven’t experienced what we experience living here,” McDonald said. “Respect where people are. Just because we may not have much or we’re in this situation doesn’t mean we don’t try.”
Jasmine Fernández is a journalist covering Delray Beach and Boca Raton for The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at jfernandez@pbpost.com and follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @jasminefernandz.