I lived at 4500 N. Winchester for 1 year, and I decided I couldn't take it anymore--oh yea, and they amended our contract, jacked the rent up, and were going to make us pay for heat. I just want to start by saying the building and unit, which was brand new from top to bottom, were extremely clean and much nicer than anything we had seen around the city (like the apartment with no front door handle, or the one with blood stains on the wall) and is conveniently close to the Brown Line. Not to mention, the area bound by Lawrence, Ashland, Western, and Damen is the possibly the safest area in all of Chicago. This is based on police reports filed and the types of crimes committed, which you can find online.
With that being said, I don't know who you can rely on to get a single thing done. Our toilet wobbled prior to us moving into the unit, which was supposed to be fix. I called the building manager, and I sent a couple of emails to the management about getting it fixed after we moved in before the wax seal was broken and water leaked. Needless to say, no one cared, and a few weeks later water started leaking from the base of the toilet. After many more calls and emails, someone was always scheduled to come "tomorrow." The building manager claims a plumber was there, but my girlfriend was in the unit the days he claims and no one ever showed up. The toilet was fixed SIX, that's right SIX months later. The management always blamed us for calling the building manager, even though we sent them emails so their was a paper trail, and the building manager always claimed the management never contacted him.
Secondly, the water lines are interconnected between units, so unless your unit is the first to receive the water coming out of boiler from the top floor, you're screwed. Additionally, the shower valves are not pressure balanced so when your neighbor turns on the cold water, be prepared to get scalded by the hot water that DRIPS from your shower head. Sooner than later you figure out that the building has a built in advanced warning system--the jack-hammering that echoes through the walls will let you know that your neighbor turned the water on, which gives you a narrow margin to escape the hot water you waited so patiently for.
Next, the water pressure was so bad I had to wait AT LEAST 10 minutes to get hot water in the morning. The best part about this is that when you turned your water off, and turned it on more than 15 minutes later, you have to wait another 10 minutes to get hot water again.
This leads me to my next point. Your unit will come equipped with a dishwasher that you can't use. Because of the water takes so long to heat up and because of the lack of pressure throughout, your dishwasher is fed with cold water to rinse and clean the dishes. And if you know anything about sanitation (or when you unload the dishwasher you can see for yourself) you need hot water to CLEAN the dishes. The management just couldn't understand this. They claimed that the dishwasher was supposed to heat the water up, but when I called the maker of the dishwasher, they told me that the dishwasher isn't working properly because it's can't heat cold water to the necessary temperature to properly wash the dishes.
Next, the heat is hit or miss, and is either on or off (there are units in the living room, and in the bedrooms that you turn on). By this I mean although the heat was "on," there was nothing blowing out, but worked in other rooms. And because you can't control the flow of air blowing, the rooms typically get unbearably hot at night. At night we would turn the heat on in our living room to keep the room at a reasonably cool level. The problem with this is that the unit in the living room would stop working for weeks at a time. Once again, the management and building manager always claimed someone would be there "tomorrow" to look at it, but no one ever showed up. The building manager even told us once that the pipes were frozen in other units and we should "wait" for them to unfreeze albeit in the middle of winter.
Lastly, we called a few days before and the night before our movers were to move us out, so the building manager could unlock/open the gate and allow the truck access to the back door. The jerk never unlocked the gate, and then turned off his phone when we called after checking the gate in the morning prior to the movers arriving. Our movers had to park on the corner of the street and lug everything through the front doors...the move ended up taking an extra hour and a half because of the extra hauling.
Overall, the building and common areas will always be spic-and-span, and people visiting will always be impressed (like the smell of fresh laundry when you walked in the building). But there comes a point where you'd give up some/all of the "nice" things that aren't used daily for those things that are like hot water and heat. read more