Marianne Apartments

I've lived here for about a year and a half and while it has a great location, the building is falling apart and Cornerstone seems unwilling to invest the necessary funds to ensure safe & decent living. The front door has worked for about 3 weeks out of the 18 months I've lived here, and it's better when it's broken because when it locks it's unresponsive to our unlock codes. I've had multiple sewage backups overflow onto my kitchen floor and spent tons of money on replacing items; there has been no structural fix and it's only a matter of time before it happens again. I currently have a daily sewage smell so strong you can smell it from the hall for multiple hours every day, and the only solution they provided were small air fresheners to put down the drain. I've called multiple times about gas smells, and after cornerstone had given it the eyerolling "it's fine" the fire department has promptly come out and detected dangerous levels of CO and made me immediately air out the entire building. It's been over 6 months since that event and the CO detector in the hall is still missing after a senior pm remarked something to the effect that "if it was there it probably would have been going off like crazy" (in addition to - now 3 - smoke alarms going off throughout the day for low batteries). The staff is generally very responsive and I've always had great experience with the maintenance folks - they just have their hands tied by upper levels forcing them to do bad work. I had 3 teams come over multiple weeks to verify that my oven did in fact need replacing before they finally replaced it, every one of them indicating that it would likely be cheaper to just trust their staff and replace it when recommended. The profit incentive of massive landlords like cornerstone regularly verge into the territory of violating habitable condition regulations and continue to do the bare minimum to maximize rents and minimize investments in keeping their properties safe and decent.

My neighbors are almost entirely excellent folks and I enjoy everything from a pleasant nod as we pass with some and long natural conversations when seeing others. It's an old building and maintenance requests aren't foreign, but the maintenance staff is all incredible - especially Vicente, I always love seeing him even when it's just passing him on the sidewalk. Maintenance requests have mostly been given quick attention, with the issues & delays mostly coming from upper management not trusting the judgement of the front-line maintenance staff and sending out other people to confirm what they've already been told (took like 3 folks to tell them it was, in fact, better & less expensive to just replace my oven). Property management workers have been really pleasant when I've had to interact with them, and do what's within their limited power to assist & support tenants when we need it. I think the very nature of Cornerstone's model & size is problematic and harmful for the community, but that's not the staff's fault, and they've done what they can to make up for the entity they work for.