Feces, Rats, Neglect: Camden Tenants Detail Housing ‘Nightmare’

Tenants of Camden’s Tamarack Station Apartments, Conifer Village at Ferry Station, and Ferry Manor Senior Apartments say they are living through a “nightmare” of human waste, rodent infestations, and unheated units that has persisted for years. 

For Tamar Robinson in Tamarack Station, the worst was the stench of sewage from the vacant apartment connected to hers, where management’s failure to board up the door and windows led to squatters breaking in and defecating there.

Ferry Manor resident Richard McNeil has vivid memories of a woman dying in the unit next door in 2024, and recalled that nobody found her body for two weeks. After the discovery, management took seven days to clean up the dead woman’s apartment, said McNeil, and by then, maggots had invaded his home. 

Ryan Brittingham said her son can’t play safely outside her Tamarack apartment because for the past two years, a wobbly piece of plywood has replaced the concrete walkway that used to lead to her door. Betty Garrett, also in Tamarack, places a folded-up towel atop the broken flooring alongside her bathtub hoping to prevent a fall.

Residents say they share myriad horrors: leaks that are rarely if ever repaired, and the mold that results; insect and rodent infestations; and a nearly complete lack of heat for up to as much as a year or two, forcing residents to use their ovens to warm their apartments and wear coats, hats and gloves around the clock in the winter. It’s also typical, say tenants, for maintenance staff to cut holes in the walls and ceilings to facilitate repairs and not come back to patch them for weeks or months. Ferry Manor has a recurring problem with a broken door that intruders have used and a security guard that is no longer stationed at the building but drives around the property instead.

At a meeting at the Camden Prep High School cafeteria hosted by Camden Councilman Chris Collins on March 24, roughly 75 residents voiced their frustrations with the conditions at the Conifer Realty, LLC  properties before a panel that included Camden housing inspector for the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs Vance Bowman; Camden rent control officer Lance Fussell; attorney Olga Pomar of South Jersey Legal Services; and Conifer’s regional manager Shante Madison and the developer’s vice-president of property management Kelly McKenna.

The problems with the properties were nothing new. Bowman estimated that Conifer was cited for violations by the city 178 times last year and is eventually expected to pay court-ordered fines on those. Recently, said Bowman, Conifer paid over $123,000 that it owed for state fines, with over $6,000 still due to the state.

Bowman said the fines were “not producing results, that’s the problem.” He said that some had to do with Conifer not having the required amount of maintenance workers for the buildings they operate. With an estimated 700-odd total units in the three complexes and the Ferry Landing townhouses also run by the developer, Bowman said Conifer would need nine maintenance workers to be in compliance; when they were cited in 2025, they only had four.

“We’d rather they spend their money on necessary maintenance,” said Bowman, “and not fines.”

Conifer has in the past received tax abatements in the form of PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) agreements that allow affordable housing developers to pay a set annual service charge instead of traditional property taxes. 

Collins opened the meeting by acknowledging conditions in the units. “I’ve heard a lot about your challenges,” he told the attendees, explaining that, for the sake of time, “This is not a meeting where we’re everybody’s going to stand up and say this is broke, this is broke, this is broke. I know there’s a lot of mess going on.”

Moments later, Tamarack resident Anthony Carver approached Collins. “Can I say one thing?” he asked.  “I’ve been here nine years. I’ve got raw sewage coming up in my unit since Saturday. I’m sick, I’m throwing up and I pay my rent every month on time!”

Edward Guest held up some of the dead gnats–attached to a piece of cardboard–that had infested his Ferry Manor apartment because, he says, the trash chute next door has been broken for six months and garbage is all over the floor. Tamarack resident Burt Taylor said “the mice are so bad I can hear them eating through the walls,” and has pictures on his phone of large piles of rodent feces.

During the meeting, tenants were advised of their rights. Fussell told them that rents can only be increased 3.5% once a year, and Pomar, who is representing some of the tenants and had recently toured Tamarack, told them she’d seen “some apartments that were in horrible shape” and that they had “the right to decent, safe, sanitary conditions.”

Collins related a recent incident in which Tamarack resident Shirley Allen’s oven needed repair and she was promised a new one. Instead, he said, she was brought a range covered with grease and full of rat feces. “That one,” Collins told the tenants, “just blew my mind completely. How do you allow your maintenance department to deliver an appliance in that condition?”

Tamarack tenant Antoinette Bean was one of several residents who said family members had made repairs in her apartment when Conifer would not help. “I pay my rent, I don’t miss a beat,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

McKenna and Madison did not refute the residents’ complaints. McKenna blamed the problems on inadequate maintenance staffing, and spoke of her difficulty in keeping workers she hires.

“The work force isn’t what it used to be,” she said. “As quickly as we find someone, we lose someone.”  She told the tenants what she needed to do was “to listen to all of you and really evaluate what’s needed, adding, “I can’t make up for the past. All I can do is try to do better. We’re going to work really hard.”

Madison said Conifer was planning to hire three additional maintenance workers.

Bowman said he happened to be at Tamarack last year when a ceiling completely collapsed in one of the apartments. “Had the tenant not been sitting in a chair when it happened, she’d have been really hurt,” he said. 

Residents recalled a tenant meeting last summer rife with similar complaints . “We were here in August and nothing’s still getting done!” said Robinson. 

Collins said that Camden business administrator Timothy Cunningham had recently toured the properties, and that “the city is going to take some action.” He also reminded residents that they could share their concerns at monthly city council meetings.

“What we need to do as tenants,” said Guest, “is get together and confront them straight up. If we got together, we could bring it to attention.”

Two days after the meeting, Collins and a handful of tenants stood in a parking lot in front of the Conifer office on Ferry Avenue speaking about the conditions on social media. Collins noted that a crew of Conifer maintenance workers seemed to be attending to some of the repairs, but Bean was skeptical.

“They’re going to everyone’s house to put a band-aid on it,” she said. “As soon as they calm people down, they’ll stop doing what they’re supposed to do. I don’t trust them at all.”

Collins was more optimistic. “I think something good’s going to come out of this,” he said. “I believe progress will be made.”