Josephine Roberts has to move – right away – out of the rundown southwest Atlanta apartment that has been her home for 25 years.

“It’s probably for the best,” Roberts, 65, told the AJC on Thursday after meeting with an apartment management company that is trying to relocate the 180 people stranded in the Hidden Pines apartments after the bank foreclosed on the property. “The conditions [at Hidden Pines] are not [safe] living standards. I don’t think we, as a people, should live in this type of environment… It was unbelievable.”

Hidden Pines was not always bad, Roberts said. But the two-story buildings that flank Cushman Circle now are not fit for people, she said.

All the windows on one of the buildings have been boarded up as have most of the windows in the one across the street where people were still living when city officials discovered some of them in apartments without electricity or water.

“This property is not safe,” said Mitzi Bickers with the Mayor’s Office for human services.

Bickers said city workers discovered the Hidden Pines residents when crews were dispatched to investigate reports that broken pipes were spewing untreated sewage. She said several senior citizens and pregnant women were moved Friday while the others will leave over the next few weeks.

Bickers told the AJC only eight of the 23 families, almost all with children, were on the “rent rolls.” The rest were not and simply squatting in empty units, using electricity from other apartments or had rigged the Georgia Power Co. lines so they could have lights and current.

The lender has agreed to give the rest of the residents – those living there legally as well as those who are not – 30 days to move, Bickers said. The management company handling Hidden Pines for the bank is offering apartments at other complexes they manage.

Roberts, retired from a shirt manufacturing job, has applied for a three-bedroom apartment on Fairburn Road for her, her daughter and her two teenage granddaughters.

“I’m hoping it comes through,” Roberts said.

Representatives from Atlanta schools, Georgia Power, several homeless shelters and two apartment complexes were stationed Thursday at tables with folding chairs on a makeshift, asphalt basketball court next to the still-open apartment building.

“We have a lot of people here who have been displaced,” Bickers said. “We’ve got to move these people out of here. We’re not leaving until we make sure we’ve got everybody transitioned.”