Great apartment, greedy landlord
Pros
Overall a nice apartment on a fairly quiet street. Nice fixtures throughout, good kitchen. Maintenance requests were fulfilled, online apartment portal worked well. Roof access (though it's just a standard roof).
Cons
Number one issue: landlord was greedy greedy greedy and raised our rent to insane degrees on each renewal (or at least tried to). First year, they asked to increase by $700, we said NO, they agreed to $250. Second year, they asked to increase by like $1000 and wouldn't agree to less than a $500 increase, which we could not afford. They ended up renting it to new tenants at over $1500 more than we ever paid. Unconscionable, and the apartment is not worth that much money. Bedrooms are super small, no living room space if you have three roommates, kind of an awkward layout because they clearly converted it to a three bedroom. The floating sinks in both bathrooms fell off the wall at separate points of our 2-year stay (we ended up propping them up on boxes to prevent the pipes being sheared). And the TRASH. This block has a serious rat problem because it has a serious trash problem. Rats frolic through the mess of the trash area, and there is trash up and down the whole block, around every tree, in every gutter. In our apartment we had intermittent ant and cockroach problems but never anything terrible. The basement floods, and our exposed brick walls (top floor) leaked during storms (caused a lot of our art to grow mold and need to be discarded actually).
Advice to the owners
I wish they had the goal of retaining tenants rather than always chasing a higher rent payment, people move out every year because of the rent increases. Joel did a good job as a super but he can only do so much when the landlord is so damn greedy.