Mold, Mice, & Millions: What’s Happening at Heritage Village?

In July of 2025, LambPage reported about Heritage Village, which is an affordable apartment building located at 258 Brunswick Avenue in Lambertville, New Jersey.

Residents were upset about mismanagement and poor living conditions after many apartments had been flooded when the fire suppression system opened up in the middle of the night in a top-floor apartment. Remediation happened, but the work was not complete. Floors in the hallways were torn up, leaving nothing but plywood pathways, and drywall was cut away at the bottom of the walls, which exposed apartments to the common areas.

Linda lived in the apartment where the sprinklers went off. Almost all of her possessions were destroyed by water and firefighting foam. Months after the incident, her old apartment was thick with mold.

Linda had been moved to a temporary apartment where she was to be housed until her previous unit got renovated. There, mice entered the kitchen through the cutaway wall and rodent feces could be seen from the hallways. Linda was also waking up with insect bites on her skin. At the same time, CIS Management claimed they hadn’t received Linda’s rent checks. After she cancelled the missing checks, management returned them to her unopened, in the original envelopes.

Renata, another resident, was also living in a temporary unit, because her apartment was damaged by cascading sprinkler system water. Although she got moved to a completely different apartment, CIS Management wouldn’t let her change the apartment number on her lease to match the unit to which she had been relocated. As a result, Renata lived with the daily stress of losing her housing voucher and becoming homeless, because her subsidy provider required her mailing address to match her lease address.

CIS Management repeatedly denied or ignored Renata’s requests, so she appealed to the city, the state, the police, the mayor, lawyers, social workers, and local clergy. None could help. She also reached out multiple times to Christiana Foglio, the owner of CIS Management, but Renata never got a response from Foglio.

One Year Later: What Has Changed?

Linda discovered that the mice coming into her kitchen were actually baby rats, so she found a new apartment and relocated to Ringoes, NJ.

Renata had to move out of Heritage Village, because CIS Management wouldn’t update her apartment number. Ultimately, she had to choose between losing her housing voucher and finding a new home. When she did find an alternative, it took two months to move all of her belongings, because she did it alone.

Renata had a one-bedroom apartment in Heritage Village at Lambertville, but now she’s in an efficiency—basically a kitchen and a bedroom with no closet. Some of the outlets don't work in her new place. The front door leaks and there are no knobs on the kitchen cabinets. Renata’s possessions—many family heirlooms and religious artifacts—couldn’t all fit in her new apartment, so she had to rent a storage unit. As a result, her expenses have gone up $350 per month. She feels every dollar of that increase.

“CIS basically imposed a self-help eviction on us,” Renata said. She described the company’s inaction as “willful neglect and malice.”

Renata recently graduated from Columbia University with a Master’s Degree in social work. She now has a job counselor, and she’s looking for employment. Her goal is to work towards ending violence against women and children.

“I want to help people,” she said.

Although Renata no longer lives in Heritage Village, she remains concerned about the residents who still reside in her former apartment building.

“They [CIS Management] own like 30 properties for low-income, disabled, and elderly people. How many people are they doing this to?” Renata said. “And how do they get away with it? Because good people don’t do anything about it.”

Current Conditions

Heritage Village residents describe getting letters from CIS Management saying that they owed hundreds of dollars in accumulated late fees.

“They don’t cash your check on time and then they blame you for being late,” said Pat, an 89-year-old resident and retired nurse.

Pat was told by a management representative that she had to send her rent by check, because there was no way to pay online. Pat kept asking until a different employee gave her a website address where she could pay her rent via the internet. She has been paying online and avoiding late fees ever since.

‘Getting the runaround’ is a common theme in stories told by residents of Heritage Village. For example, the lights in the lobby haven’t worked “since the flood of 2023.” Only one of six ceiling lamps lights up and the entryway is dark inside as a result. The common area chairs are stained and torn, the front door is broken, and the doorframe is worn and in need of a cleaning.

Outside also has issues.

“Sometimes we have strobe lights,” Pat said about the lamps in the parking lot.

“Someone in a wheelchair ended up falling in the drain,” said Marjorie, another resident. “They couldn’t see where they were going, because of the poor lighting.”

The hole in the asphalt hasn’t changed since last year.

Inside, the hallways have no floor coverings. Instead, they are lined with exposed plywood. Yellow plastic caution signs and a water bucket sit under an open ceiling tile, and the floor all around is dark and discolored.

When you exit the elevator onto the bottom floor, you can smell moisture and mildew—as if you’re walking into the basement of an old house after heavy rainfall.

Al, a retired truck driver, lives on the bottom level. The floors there have been stripped down to nothing but rough concrete.

“The building needs to be maintained,” Al said.

He pointed to the utility room and told a story about the boiler breaking.

The water-damaged apartments look the same as they did a year ago. No obvious work has been done, and the units haven’t been made livable.

“The TV in the community room doesn’t work anymore,” Marjorie said. “It stopped working during COVID and hasn’t worked since.”

The COVID lockdowns happened six years ago.

“Also, the security cameras aren’t hooked up,” Marjorie added. “They don’t work.”

Residents easily pointed out problems; all they had to do was look around.

The building has gone through numerous property managers in the past year. Bonnie, the employee that residents say actually cared about residents, left in tears after just a short time on the job. That was in October of 2025. Following her departure, the building was without a manager until December.

“Since I’ve been here there must’ve been 10-12 managers,” said Stan, another resident. “I’ve been here since 2024 and it’s gone downhill.”

There were several deaths in the building. Residents asked management to check on a woman who hadn’t been seen in a while. It turned out she was dead in her unit for three weeks. Another woman passed recently. She was 98. Residents said she was moved to an apartment with “no wallboards on one side,” because that unit was damaged in the flood. Her car is still parked in the lot.

Tenants only pay gas and electric. In September of 2025, residents found a water shutoff notice on the building’s front door. The reason: “Non-payment of bill.”

“The lease says no smoking, but people still smoke,” said Stan. “And if they do any repairs, they take parts from one unit and use them in another.”

Stan has taken to sleeping in his living room, because a faulty compressor in the neighboring apartment makes too much noise at night. He asked CIS Management to replace the broken unit, but they haven’t yet done so.

“They just completely ignore us. You go talk to them—nothing,” he said. “They think they walk on water. It’s senior abuse.”

Tax Break

In September of 2025, CIS Management announced that they had “secured over $15 million to preserve and renovate Heritage Village at Lambertville, ensuring 86 affordable senior apartments remain accessible for the next 30 years.”

In spring 0f 2025, Lambertville City Council granted an extension of the 2003 PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) program to Heritage Village at Lambertville, which enables them to pay a fixed tax rate rather than paying conventional taxes.

In return, Lambertville gets 86 affordable housing units—or so it looks on paper.

“There are thirty-two apartments on this floor,” Stan said, pointing to the doors in the hallway near his apartment. “Twenty of them are empty.”

Lambertville’s City Council was aware of the living conditions at Heritage Village when they approved the PILOT extension in 2025. Here’s an excerpt from the meeting agenda:

“...the Sponsor intends to renovate the 87 units, community room, office space, and common areas for the Project in order to restore the viability of the units of affordable senior housing for residency and preserve the existing rental subsidy.”

The PILOT extension was granted a year ago, and renovations were expected to begin in August, which is now. Residents have been repeatedly promised action next month, or the month after that. As they wait, tenants and taxpayers are paying for substandard housing while CIS Management gets a tax break.

Living in Limbo

Many of Heritage Village’s residents are retired, disabled, or on a fixed income. They can’t easily up and move. Instead of enjoying quiet retirement, they have to choose between ignoring poor living conditions or fighting for their rights—the latter of which can easily become an all-encompassing, full-time, non-paying job.

If renovation work does begin soon, current tenants will have to reside in a noisy construction zone for the duration—all while paying full rent.

Meanwhile, there are several pending lawsuits against CIS Management related to Heritage Village at Lambertville. A judge recently ordered an investigation, and the NJ State Attorney General is “looking into the situation.”