I broke the lease on my Museum Place apartment in fall 2013, first time to break a lease in 35 years of renting. Argumentative, unresponsive management and maintenance. Condition on move-in: apart from the hallway, just patch-painted; stained bathroom tiles; plugged drain; burnt-out bulbs; muck under toilet seat from an earlier overflow; musty hall closet with just one shelf instead of the two in the model unit; other closet doors hung reversed. None of this is necessarily a big deal, but the way things work there made some of them unnecessarily ISSUES. Building policies didn t help the maintenance guy can resolve a issue by himself, after saying that nothing can be done or I won t do that.
Also, there were noise and odor problems due to odd building construction there s a crevice between walls and ceiling. In my apartment the gap was at least a half-inch in one corner I could hear conversations that seemed to float down out of the ceiling, smell whenever my neighbor was making popcorn even with doors and windows shut. Also, once, smelled the other neighbor s dog accident through the same inter-wall routing. Other noise sources, apart from usual street noise: building equipment over the top northeast floor, Safeway s 24-hour bottle return on the southwest ground floor.
Management doesn t seem to think they need to keep tenants fully informed. Example: When a piece of equipment in the garage caught fire, the building was evacuated. The manager was off-site, and the fire department apparently had to wait for her to arrive before they could shut the alarm off; it shrieked for maybe 40 minutes. My cat was terrified; I assume other pets were. But the manager never informed tenants that anything had happened, so any pet owners who were at work at the time likely never knew why their animals were scared or why, possibly, they did any damage. They do seem to like handing out dog biscuits in the office, but I d prefer a sense of responsibility.
