I was just yanked out of bed for the second time tonight due to a false fire alarm. The firemen are jaded and don't take the alarms seriously, because the building has false alarms on a regular basis. We had four (that I know of) last month, almost always after 1am, a couple the month before that, and we're a week into March and on track to break records!

Judging from the other reviews here, these problems have persisted for years. That's quite disheartening.

We're moving out when our lease is up. We might sue them to end our lease early, because I consider this a breach of *their* end of the contract.

And it's not twenty-somethings yanking the alarms for fun. The firemen say that there are problems with the actual alarm system and water pressure issues. In other words, it is The Avalon's fault. Good thing we pay premium rent!

User Responses
From: Murphbuzzy	Date: 03/09/2008
I will agree with this poster, been living here since 2004. I have many times been woke up at 1-2-3am to false alarms. Once to smoke in hall way to someones cooking. I've been here for 4 years and it is my last year here, due to rent raising every year 9.9%, the false fire alarms, packages now left at your front door. Not that I don't trust people but, I don't trust all people. they have room to hold our packages. We are not able with all shipments of packages to be signed for so they will hold them then. So, other than a few issues it's not bad, now exhausted.
From: YerbaBuenaManager	Date: 08/05/2009
First, a disclaimer - I am the manager of Avalon Yerba Buena. The causes of the vast majority of the false fire alarms in the past have been corrected. One apartment needed a special type of smoke detector per the Fire Code, but the wrong type had been installed at some point in the past. Often when the residents in this apartment took a shower it would trigger the alarm building-wide. We have replaced the smoke detector with the proper type, and the shower-induced false alarms have ceased. There was also a leak in one of the fire sprinkler pumps that caused the fire alarm system to think that the sprinklers were going off whenever there was a fluctuation in pressure of the City's water supply, thus triggering the fire alarm. We fixed the leak in this pump, and these false alarms too have ceased. There have been a few false alarms since, but for reasons that were beyond out control: someone working at Whole Foods (in our commercial space) accidentally broke pone of the sprinkler heads off, etc. Since we have fixed those two problems, false alarms have decreased 90% at least. Re: the packages being left at apartment doors that the response mentioned. We hold all packages in the office and put notices on mail boxes. We will leave them at someone's front door BY REQUEST or even leave them inside somemone's apartment if they would like. We will also deliver faxes to residents' doors or inside their apartment by request.

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