We lived here for almost two and a half years from 2017-2019. It was a decent place to live,…read morethough we had many issues. I noticed that there were a lot of 5 star reviews. I'm glad most people had a good experience here, but I felt like I really needed to take the time to document my experience in detail for the Yelp community. It has been over 2 years since we lived there, so the property managers may have changed, but the mechanical issue likely still remains.
First, the positives. It was really nice to be right off the bike path. It made it very family friendly and definitely felt very communal. We were walking distance to Davis Square, and it was a nice and beautiful walk along the bike path. The movie and community rooms were really nice. It has a pool table, full kitchen, multiple TV's, and a massive table. The room was definitely under-utilized as I hung out there quite often!
The maintenance team was also amazing. Dick and Evan were very skilled, prompt, courteous, and professional! They definitely went above and beyond the call of duty. They live on-site, which made thing super convenient and their off-hours response time super quick.
My biggest complaint is a design flaw with their HVAC and hot water system.
They have a single device that heats both the hot water and the central air.
The apartment has an instant hot water Navien boiler that also provides hot water to heat the air. It can only work on one of these at any given instance. So, at any given time, you have to choose to have either hot water or hot air. Being in Boston with sub freezing weather, this was not acceptable. If you take a 15 minute shower, the apartment would not be heated for the duration of that shower, so it would be freezing cold in the apartment. We were a corner unit, so the issue was likely worse in our unit than others. This was especially a problem in January/February when the temperatures dipped below 0.
We had a 2 year old living there, so the temperature fluctuations was definitely a problem. We ended up having to get multiple space heaters, which proved expensive to operate. I escalated this complaint to the regional manager of Windsor communities, and they sent their regional maintenance person along with an outside plumber. They kept repeating that the system is operating normally, according to specifications (see attached letters). Never once did they recognize the design flaw in their HVAC system, or apologize for the way in which the "correctly working system" decreased our quality of life living there.
The management company is not very helpful or friendly. There was high turnover (I think because it was such a stressful job), and when we had complaints, they would typically try to tell us why we were wrong or change the subject. I was disappointed to find out that the regional manager acted in the same way as the on-site property managers, which makes me think that avoiding concerns and issues by trying to explain them away is a company culture issue that comes from the top.
Other issues we had:
- Recurring pot smoking from a unit below us
- Fire alarms randomly going off in the middle of the night (seemingly just in our unit)
- Lack of guest parking spots
- People parked in our assigned garage spot, and management not stepping in when the tow company did not come
- Difficulty getting packages. If UPS delivered something to the front office, we would have to pick it up by the time the office closed, or remember to email them. This was inconvenient and I suggested they get a storage locker multiple times.
- Constant construction nearby. This affected our water pressure multiple times. Thankfully we got out of there before the green line construction really started to take off.