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.
CUMRU TOWNSHIP — 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.
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 violation 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 communities, told Schwank’s office on May 12 that the elevator had been restored to service. It broke down the following day and trapped six residents for more than an hour, a resident told WFMZ.
Just over a month later, on June 20, building management said in a letter to residents that both elevators were out of service. “Your safety is our top priority,” the letter said. “We understand how challenging the situation is and want you to know that this matter is being taken very seriously.”
On July 31, more than a year after the first notice of violation, Cumru Township took its strongest action yet, issuing a citation against building owner David Lesser for failing to keep at least one elevator operational at all times.. The violation could cost his company up to $1,000 in fines per day, depending on the judgment from a magisterial district court.
But it was the Berks County District Attorney’s Office, which had sent its own letter on June 30 demanding action and citing the state’s consumer protection law, that produced the clearest concession. Facing that scrutiny, the owner’s attorney agreed to round-the-clock, on-site staffing so repairs could happen faster.
“The district attorney pushing on the issue got that piece done, which is important,” said Kelsey Frankowski, the township solicitor. ”Because if you have someone who’s off-site who has to drive 20 minutes, or people are trapped in an elevator, and then it takes another 20 minutes for the elevator to get fixed … that’s not ideal”
‘Every lever possible’
It’s unclear what, if anything, government officials could have done to speed up repairs.
Township officials are in a bind. They acknowledge the ongoing safety risks and building code violations, but also want to avoid the most drastic option: declaring the building uninhabitable.
Andy Donnell, president of Cumru Township’s Board of Commissioners, said the board and the township have tried to compensate with the tools they had. But pressure and public attention, he admitted, only go so far. He said the challenge the township kept confronting was the lack of mechanisms available to “incentivize a solution happening faster.”
“What we are trying to do is pull every lever possible that’s legal,” Donnell said. “We don’t want to put hundreds of people out on the street, but we also don’t want them to be in a position where they may be exploited or unable to defend or protect their own interests for any reason.”
Additionally, Sencit’s owner wasn’t easy to find. County records show the property is held by Sencit Townhouse LLC, which converted from a limited partnership in a 2021 deed signed by David I. Lesser, then of California-based Everest Properties.
Lesser later co-founded Peak XV Realty Capital, an Austin-based real estate investment firm that lists Sencit among its six properties. It took the township close to three months, with help from the district attorney, to get past the LLCs and identify Lesser as the person behind the building, time that officials say delayed their enforcement moves.
At this point, the district attorney’s office is satisfied with the response it has received so far from the owner’s legal representative. But “our inquiry is not finished,” District Attorney John Adams told Spotlight PA.
HUD, which pays Sencit’s owners about $2 million annually in Section 8 assistance, can withhold subsidy payments or terminate a contract.
However, there would have to be “pretty significant building issues” for HUD to step in and take action, according to Adam Weintraub-Barth, director of housing justice at the Philadelphia-based SeniorLAW Center. In its latest HUD inspection, on Feb 12, 2025, Sencit received a passing score of 96/100.
In response to Spotlight PA inquiries, HUD pointed to the same repair schedule that the property manager gave to other agencies.
“The property’s management agent informed HUD that the project remains on schedule with one elevator expected to be fully modernized and operational by the end of July 2026,” HUD wrote in an email. Sencit missed that deadline.
Neither PMI nor Lesser answered questions about the elevator repairs. In communications between the township and representatives of the company, summarized and compiled by Great Valley Consultants, PMI attributed the delay in contract negotiations to Otis Elevator Company. PMI representatives did try to explain what they were doing to keep residents from regularly calling 911.
“What we found is that residents were contacting emergency services because they were unable to go downstairs to smoke for a few minutes while we reset the elevator,” a PMI employee said in an October 2025 email. “While we understand this is an inconvenience, I am sure you can appreciate that it is not [an] emergency.”
A spokesperson for Otis Elevator Company told Spotlight PA the repair work itself takes a long time, in part because of the age of the machines.
“The elevators in this building have components that are between 25 and 50 years old,” Cara Shank, director of communications for Otis Elevator Company, told Spotlight PA via email on Aug. 11. “Like other aging mechanical equipment, older elevators are more likely to shut down, and face longer periods out of service since access to spare parts for this older equipment is limited. This is why these elevators are in the process of being modernized.”
Otis said on Aug. 13 that the modernization of the elevator sealed by the state would be complete “in the coming days,” and that it will be placed back into service after the state inspection. When Spotlight PA visited the building on Aug. 19, it was still not functional. The state said Otis recently requested an inspection. As of Aug. 20, the inspection was scheduled for Monday, Aug. 24. The elevator cannot be placed back into service unless it passes inspection and the Department of Labor and Industry clears it for operation.
As for the other elevator, the state has given the owner until Aug. 25 to fix safety deficiencies flagged in its last inspection, or it will shut the elevator down.
As of Aug. 20, neither the owner nor management had responded to the state’s ultimatum.
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