Despite pressure from township, state, and county officials, one elevator remains out of service more than a year after the state sealed it.

By Gabriela Martínez, Spotlight PA

Pictured above: Residents at Sencit Towne House Apartments wait for the only working elevator on Aug. 19, 2026. Photo courtesy of Gabriela Martínez / Spotlight PA

This story was produced by the Berks County bureau of Spotlight PA, an independent, nonpartisan newsroom. Sign up for Good Day, Berks, a daily dose of essential local stories at spotlightpa.org/newsletters/gooddayberks.

For the older residents of the Sencit Towne House Apartments in Berks County, especially those with disabilities and health conditions, elevators aren’t a luxury — they’re a necessity.

But over the past two years, the machines inside the 200-unit, 10-floor building in Cumru Township have failed over and over again, resulting in serious consequences for some residents.

A woman broke her arm attempting to go up four flights of stairs to reach her apartment because both elevators were down. Six people were trapped in a cab for over an hour.

“The steps are very steep. They’re not your normal standard steps, and it took me 30 minutes to get down the steps, 45 minutes to get back up to the seventh floor,” said Nan Frankl, 78, who was left to climb the stairs — cane in one hand while she gripped the rail in the other — during a three-day outage earlier this summer.

The privately owned apartment complex receives taxpayer-funded subsidies from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to house low-income seniors, many of whom are medically fragile and rely on mobility aids to get around.

As outages continued and complaints from residents piled up, the property fell out of compliance with state inspection requirements, and the state sealed one of the two elevators in April 2025. As of Aug. 19, it was still not functional amid a long-promised modernization effort.

The elevator cannot operate until it passes an inspection scheduled for Aug. 24.

Property Management Inc., a Camp Hill company that manages Sencit as well as more than 360 properties and $4 billion in assets, says an update of the second elevator will begin as soon as the first is completed. That elevator has repeatedly broken down, leaving residents with no working lift, and the state is threatening to shut the machine down completely.

Through records and interviews with local officials, Spotlight PA found that it has taken two notices of violations, a citation that could carry fines of up to $1,000 a day, a district attorney inquiry, and a state senator’s intervention to get this close to fully repairing one old elevator at Sencit.

Neither PMI nor the building’s owner, David Lesser, responded to repeated requests for comment, which included a certified letter.

Sencit Towne House Apartments in Cumru Township. Photo courtesy of Gabriela Martínez / Spotlight PA

A pattern of promises

For residents like Frankl, the unreliability of the elevators makes daily life difficult. If she has an appointment, she worries the elevator will not work on her way down or when she returns.

“It’s always a concern because you just don’t know,” Frankl said.

She recalled an incident this past winter when she had to wait six hours in the lobby to get back to her apartment. Eventually, a Cumru Township police officer helped her up the stairs, she said.

“There were a bunch of us who waited. Some people took the steps, but I was not in the mood to take the steps that day, and I had my walker and everything else, so I couldn’t get up the steps with that,” Frankl said.

Margaret Eitnier, 79, lives on the sixth floor, and when the elevators are down, she tackles the stairs in stages. She climbs up to the fourth floor first, stops there to rest, then continues to the sixth.

“But I take a cart for groceries to go down to Giant,” Eitnier said. “I don’t want to get here and find out that the elevator isn’t working. What am I supposed to do?”

PMI first promised to fix the situation in 2024, when the township’s fire department responded to dozens of emergency calls at Sencit, six of them tied to elevator outages. In response to the township, PMI said in November of that year it had signed a “master service agreement” to modernize the elevators.

But it took about a year for PMI to actually produce a schedule for repairs, despite repeated assurances that one was coming, said Terrence Naugle, Cumru Township’s contracted commercial building inspector and vice president of Great Valley Consultants.

In the intervening months, records obtained by Spotlight PA show the township continued to receive complaints from Sencit residents.

On Feb. 10, 2025, the same day PMI shared details with the township about the proposed elevator modernization program, a resident fell and broke her arm after becoming dizzy while using the stairs. Neither elevator was working at the time, Naugle wrote in a letter to PMI, and firefighters were called to help medical responders carry her from the fourth to the ground floor.

The township issued its first notice of violation a few days later, demanding PMI provide a concrete plan and timeline. Township code enforcement departments issue notices of violations to inform property owners they are breaking a specific law, rule, or ordinance, and to set a deadline to fix an issue before harsher penalties are handed down.

“The current situation is not acceptable,” Naugle wrote in the letter.

Two months later, on April 18, 2025, the state Department of Labor and Industry did what the township could not: Inspectors placed one of the elevators out of service “to protect residents and ensure they were not using a faulty device,” an agency spokesperson said.

The township kept pressing for a repair schedule through the spring and summer, but PMI’s updates failed to materialize. By October, it had been seven months since the township’s first notice of violation, and PMI still had no firm plan. The township’s commercial building code inspector issued a second notice of violationf on Oct. 6, citing “repeated failures to maintain the elevator in operational status,” and the lack of an elevator repair schedule.

PMI responded with a preliminary copy of the repair schedule, noting it may not be an accurate representation of the final version because the technicians were still not active on the site.

Toward the end of October, state Sen. Judy Schwank (D., Berks) got involved, telling PMI President Eric Kunkle in a letter that the proposed “year-long repair schedule” was unacceptable.

Otis Elevator Company, which was hired to perform the repairs, did not begin modernization of the elevator placed out of service by the state until May of this year — about a month after originally planned.

As officials and PMI continued to go back and forth about repairing the out-of-service elevator, the building’s other elevator regularly went down.

Schwank’s office kept pressing PMI through the spring of this year, citing a steady stream of resident complaints. In May, constituents reported there was no functioning elevator, “significantly impacting their ability to access activities such as bingo, and retrieve food donations.”

Charise Walker, PMI’s vice president of affordable commun...

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