When we first moved into the apartments on Frederick/Webster I had few complaints because the price seemed good - they were charging us $690 for a one-bedroom on the first floor. BUT we have had a LOT of problems living here for less than a year and all of them are things that weren?t noticeable in a tour. Also, the rent is going up to $750 for just a one bedroom.
Firstly, I?m reiterating the awful construction stories. I know WAY too much about my upstairs' neighbors' lives, and I don't even just mean the people directly above us - I mean the people on either side of THEM. I can literally hear people peeing from all directions. I can also hear my neighbors having sex, having horrible fights, and even just having a normal-volume conversation. I hear them when they talk on the phone, when they open cupboards and the front door, and the best is when they work out to music or drop something on the floor, it's like the whole ceiling is going to just drop in. I literally recognized my neighbor when we were both entering the building the other day JUST because of her voice. You can hear people closing doors and walking around all over in the building even though we aren't even near the doors.
THERE IS A SPIDER INFESTATION. We have new spiders on the ceiling EVERY day, sometimes 2-3 spiders in one day. This is not a spring/fall problem with the bugs moving inside - these spiders have been in our apartment ALL WINTER and they even got into our bed and bit me.
I suspect the spider issue is because of the giant cracks underneath the windowsills and around the air conditioner and the fact that the windows don't actually shut all the way, the screens are bent so they don't fit correctly. We stuffed a whole sheet in there during winter to keep the cold air from coming in. Oh, the heat doesn?t work either.
The toilet is broken. The flap that covers the pipe in the bottom of the reservoir, where water drains from the tank into the bowl, is misaligned; it comes unstuck and starts flapping, letting water drain endlessly through the toilet's system. Not only is this wasteful, it's annoying as hell noise-wise.
The front door is almost always unlocked. The only time it was consistently locked was when the lock BROKE and NOBODY told us, so the keys they gave us suddenly stopped working and we had to go all the way around the building and in through the back. I called the manager about this probably twice before another tenant told me that I had to call the manager and ask for a new key myself ? they didn?t change the locks or get new keys for everybody, WE had to ask. I mean, he got us the eventually, but had I not encountered the other tenant with that bit of info and specifically asked for a new key I don't think this problem would have been 'solved;? now we just have four different keys to get around inside one building.
The managers take forever to get ahold of maintenance. Once our shower drain froze up because the heaters in the garage stopped working (ALL of them just stopped, and somehow nobody in charge noticed it). Our tub had dirty water in it and was unusable for three days, the maintenance guy couldn't fix it more quickly because ~it was a weekend~.
Others: Parking, the dirty fan in the kitchen, the fire alarm goes off EVERY time we use the stove/oven, insane number of people who smoke in their apartments even though it's a non-smoking building, the fact that people mess with the elevator (opening the hatch and putting fake trees on top of it), etc. etc. etc.
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