When the elevator doors at Marcus Garvey Garden Apartments stay shut, so do many residents’ front doors. Inside the Roxbury building for elderly and disabled tenants, months of elevator outages have left people stranded, anxious and wondering when — or if — help is coming.

The building has two elevators for residents to use. Of those, the rear elevator has not been working for over two months, to date.

During the summer, the front elevator was out from early July through early August.

“This is a senior building with people with walkers and wheelchairs,” said resident Vivian Phillips. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Raphaela Thomas, another resident, said she has even witnessed first responders carry out elderly residents on stretchers during instances when both elevators were down.

Eva Postell, another longtime resident of the building, said that when the front elevator goes down, she has to walk from her apartment toward the front of the building all the way to the back one. With COPD and breathing problems, the trip down the building’s long corridors leaves her winded and having to pause halfway.

“We depend on the elevators,” she said.

An elevator outage can also mean that residents who use walkers have to carry them — generally with assistance — down the stairs.

Phillips said that to attend doctor appointments, she would need to get assistance to walk down the steps and wait outside, sometimes in the rain.

Matt Bruker, president of SHP Management Corporation, the Maine-based company that manages the Marcus Garvey Garden Apartments, said the company has been working with its elevator contractor, design engineers and Mass Housing to address the outages.

He said that the age of the elevators can mean it takes a long time to obtain parts. SHP is currently waiting for an update from the elevator contractor on the parts needed to make near-term repairs to the rear elevator.

State Rep. Chynah Tyler, whose district includes Marcus Garvey Garden Apartments, said she has been tracking the elevator outages closely. She first noticed there was a problem when she visited the building to do a wellness check with a resident and noticed the elevator was down; a few days later, the elevator was still out.

Tyler said she has been working with SHP and understands the limited availability of parts and elevator technicians, but said she sees a need to make sure the process keeps moving.

“Urgency is important when you’re talking about accessibility,” Tyler said.

The problems with the elevators have been ongoing. Phillips said they’ve been facing challenges at least since she moved into the Marcus Garvey Apartments eight years ago, though the recent outages have been the worst yet.

For the past couple of years, she said she remembers the elevators going out two or three times per year. Postell said those outages would generally last a matter of days to a week.

In her mind, Phillips said the ideal situation is for the aging elevators to simply be replaced.

She said she’d like to see ramps installed from the terrace-level entrance at the building’s second floor — where the back elevator drops off — to help residents get down to street level in instances if the front elevator is out.

Currently, stairs lead down from the second-floor entrance, one level up because of the building’s place on a hillside to the street level, but without the elevator, the only way to get down with a walker or wheelchair is to follow the driveway out to the street and around to the front.

Phillips said she has found drivers often don’t come up the driveway.

Brucker said a long-term solution to the elevator outages is in the works. He said SHP recently received approval of a request to modernize and update the rear elevator, which should stabilize and improve its performance. But the timeline for that project is an extended one — an estimated seven and a half to 10 months design, bid, order and perform the work.

In an email, Brucker called it “quite a large undertaking.”

Residents said the repair process — and the long timeline it has brought — has been poorly communicated and shrouded in confusion. Phillips said that when she has asked for information, she’s been given a “runaround” or “non-answers,” with building management unclear about when things will actually be fixed.

Thomas said when she had asked for information about the elevators, the building’s management wasn’t able to give a proper answer about the process or the delays.

Postell, too, said that the situation has left her confused.

“I don’t understand why the elevators are taking so long to get fixed,” Postell said. “I have no clue.”

As of Oct. 31, a memo hanging in the working front elevator said the rear elevator had been out since Aug. 26, and that a repair time would be posted to the elevators once available. That memo was dated Sept. 4.

Brucker said SHP Management recently implemented a weekly update regarding the elevators, but that often the update is that there is no news. The onsite management team will be scheduling an in-person resident meeting this month to discuss overall developments with the property and hear residents’ questions and concerns.

He said those meetings, moving forward, should occur quarterly.

But in the meantime, residents said they feel like poor communication around the elevator outages, as well as other issues in the building, are an indicator that management doesn’t care about the people who live there.

“I just feel like they don’t really hear out the tenants,” Thomas said. “It’s more on their terms.”