Rats in the building
Pros
Location is great
Cons
Poor Maintenance - rodent infestation
Advice to the owners
Clean up the building
Authentic experience of a slum apartment
Pros
Nice archetecture in the lobby is left mostly intact.
Cons
All the windows are drafty in broken, not just in my apartment but in every unit. You can stand outside the building and note that tenants have blankets stuffed into windows that don't close correctly. It's 50 degrees on warmer winter days near my windows and 45 degrees when it's very cold outside. The heat is not consistent and if it is 50 degrees outside the heat goes off entirely, which stinks because these windows are useless since their seals are all broken. They even get foggy when it is cold. My oven doesn't work well and it's hard to determine the cooking time of anything (chicken, turkey, even a frozen prepared dish) because it's sometimes 100 degrees off from what the dial says. ex: 350 degrees reads somewhere in the 200s when I decided to check the oven with a themometer. Landlord ignored my complaint. No screens on the windows and landlord promised me screens but never kept his word. Needed to keep the bottom windows closed in the sweltering summer to stop my cat from going out on the ledge. Had a massive fly invasion from opening the top windows without screens. In the summer my apartment smells like rotting garbage because the super piles up the garbage outside the building instead of storing it in the basement until garbage day (it is illegal to just store garbage on the sidewalk if it isn't garbage day). If you want a hot shower, forget about it. I've made multiple complaints to the super and to 311 but nothing has changed. If I shower or wash my hands I don't even bother turning any cold water on because I'm lucky if the water is lukewarm. At almost $1800/month I should be able to have the small joy of a hot bath or shower after a long day. The water pressure is terrible so I don't even feel like I've washed my hair adequately the entire year I've lived here. You can hear rats scratching and squeaking in the walls. A neighbor left a dead rat in a trap out in the hallway, probably to prove a point. My refridgerator is small and broken even though it is a new unit - they bought the cheapest shit. My sinks leak because they are poorly installed in both kitchen and bathroom. My shower head is placed poorly so my bathroom floods with every shower no matter how I try to keep the water in. I don't even know where to stop with the complaints. The neighbors are trashy and fight with each other in the halls at early and late hours of the day. They're also filthy and drop their trash all over the stairs and lobby. The super only cleans one in a while, so the floors get sticky and you track that up to your apartment. There is a homeless encampment in one of the apartments on the 2nd floor that the landlord refuses to handle even though they steal mail and break the locks downstairs. This is one of the worst buildings I have lived in. Actually, I think maybe THE WORST building I have lived in.
Advice to the owners
If you don't want to take care of the properties that people work to pay you and live in, then sell your buildings and piss off already. Landlord isn't a career, you're a parasite.