Tenant Reviews for 537 W MELROSE ST

Avoid this place at all costs, especially if you are living in a studio. All of the studios here face the brick building next door. It's incredibly loud all the time, from babies crying in the building next door or the Insesint barking of a dog. The street is extremely narrow, so anytime a truck is stopped in the middle of the street (which seems to be often) people lay on their horns. Additionally, the studios face the alley and the trash dump trucks are extremely noisy. This happens several times a day. There is always someone balsting tecno music and I've actually been woken up from the sound of someone's AIM chatting next door. Additionally, i've been woken up at 5am to the sound of bums going through the dumpsters. It's always hot in my studio because the air conditioning never works properly and there is no circulation. It took maintenance THREE WEEKS to put a screen on my window after it blew off during a thunderstorm. Also, I had almost NO WATER for a good MONTH before maintenance cleaned out the pipes. At first, they tried telling me it was the city's fault and there was nothing I could do about it or to just take a shower at a different time. Absolutely ridiculous. Half of the outlets don't work or they are so covered with paint, its impossible to plug anything in them. THe water lives a disgusting residue / film on the bottom of the tub because the pipes are so old and its impossible to clean. THis is a great location and fun place to live, but this side of Melrose (East side) is incredibly loud and the building is terrible. Its also overpriced.

I lived here for 1 yr. It was a horrible experience. The neighborhood is very safe even at really late at night. There is a Walgreen and Melrose diner that is open 24 hours. The parking is a total problem in this area. This apartment is very overpriced. It is $100-$150 overpriced. There is another building on the same street that have similar kind of studio, but the prices are not as high as Planned property. When i 1st moved in a month later i started getting these bites and it turned out to be more and more everyday. I had no furniture or anything in my apartment other then a mattress covered in plastic. I found bed bugs in the apartment. They didnt take any responsibility about this problem other then fumigating the place few times. The company tried to blame the problem on me that i brought it in the apartment. Other then this there were cockroaches and centipedes in the apartment. I kept the place very clean but there was atleast once a month i killed these suckers. This apartment stays really really hot even if the temperature outside is in sixties. It faces the next building or the brick wall. The building engineer is helpful sometimes, but he is very late in fixing things. Once my toilet had some problem, It took him a 1 day to get back to me. I ended up fixing it on my own before he could get to it. Once my closet doors were broken. It was over 2 weeks he never fixed it. Another huge problem here is the building garbage. I recently heard from 1 of my neighbor that there are 2 people who go through the dumpster to find document and mail from it. The building engineer was contacted by my neighbor, but he did not do anything about it. The cops were called by my neighbors on several occasions but the dude was gone by then. My advise to people who are looking for apartments in this neighborhood please look at everything in the building.

Took me two months to get running water in my kitchen, despite numerous calls and notes. Apartment was never cleaned when I moved in or painted. Did not have fixtures on my bathroom cabinets for several months. Window screens were not on securely. In order to get anything fixed, I would have to send a formal letter to the management company downtown. Planned Property apartments tend to be cheaper, but it is because they do no maintenance for their tenants. The worst situation I encountered, after several months they claimed to have fixed my screens. As it turns out, they were not fastened safely and my cat fell out the Window 3 stories as a result. When I reported the incident, instead of asking if my cat was okay they tried to get me to move out. I never got any warning when people were coming in to view the apartment. Planned Property is a dishonest company and should be avoided at all costs!

Usually I like to keep a blog of how the apartment is going seeing that<br>it can be great the first month, and then go completely down hill the<br>months after.<br><br>You have to love the area if you are in your 20s. Lots of good bars,<br>places to eat, vintage and thrift shops, if I didn't work outside<br>of lakeview, I could get everything I need here and really never have to<br>leave. The area is very safe compared to the rest of the city as well.<br>As long as you have a city sticker, zone 383 sticker, and a cubs night<br>game sticker, parking isn't too bad. I always am able to find parking on<br>Melrose on the west side of Broadway. Forget about parking on the east<br>side, you don't need any zone parking stickers to park there, so there<br>are never any spots.<br><br>The staff who will lease you your apartment, are all college age kids, and aren't very informative. But at least they are honest about it. They won't lie to you if they don't know the answer to your questions. Better than being lied to about the apartment, signing the lease, and the finding out the apartment isn't what the leasing agent said it was.<br><br>So far this apartment is about what you would expect for it's<br>pricerange in this area. You still get the sliding aluminum closet<br>doors. We are having all of ours replaced right now with wooden ones<br>because the metal ones suck and are broken, not to mention hard to open.<br>At least they are getting replaced. You still get outlets painted over<br>as well. Again, this is what you would expect for this type of apartment<br>in the city.<br><br>The kitchen doesn't have a dishwasher, and the alley kitchen deadends,<br>which can make things kinda cramped, but it comes with a gas stove, and<br>you don't pay for gas! Gas stoves cook much better than electric ones in<br>my opinion. There is plenty of closet space for 1 or 2 people to live,<br>and ours came with the berber carpet which looks nice as well.<br><br>Really, you move here because you are young, you want to live in a hip area, and have a decent apartment. The maintenence staff is a little slow, but it is because they overworked. They will get done what you tell them though. The day our lease began was on a Thursday, and we planned on moving boxes into the apartment thursday, friday, and the furniture on Saturday. Well we both worked on thursday, so we weren't planning to start moving boxes till that night. I get a call from Val the buiding engineer on my commute at 5:20 and he asks me if we are moving in today because his cleaning woman didn't come and clean the apartment. I told him when we were going to be there and that he needs to have everything cleaned up by then. More or less, Val got everything cleaned up almost by the time we both got there, but at least it got cleaned. It would have been better if the apartment was clean when we picked up the keys.<br><br>That brings me to another point. Since there are two of us, you would assume that they would give us 2 sets of keys (there are about 5 keys total each). Val keeps piece mailing us the keys, and we almost have a second complete set now, I think we're just missing 1 mail key, but you would think there would be better preparation. These aren't HUGE things, but things you would expect when you move into an apartment, like when we moved into Wheaton Center 3 years ago.<br><br>Highly recommended for those of us in our 20's post college, and want to live in a clean safe neighborhood in the city, and have a clean and well kept apartment and building.<br><br>Update 6/17-Got the new closet doors yesterday! No more scratchy loud jerky metal doors with dents! They put in these painted white wooden ones that slide like butter. They replaced the track so it glides smoothly too. Evidently the new doors were smaller than the old ones, so they actually had to add a little drywall to the door opening so that the doors fit, and it looks great! completely seemless, you never would know that so much work had been done. <br>Maintenence that does things right, and does things as promised? Sounds like a winner to me :)