Cliff Smith doesn’t know exactly how many unsafe homes there are in Lake Wales, but he believes there are “quite a few.”

“There’s a chance every day that my officers may come across one and they will come back to me and say ‘we have a property here that is this, this and this,’” said Smith, who is the city’s building official and also handles code enforcement. Officers may say “It’s questionable. Would you please take a look at it to see if it is out of our hands and it needs to be actually posted unsafe?’”