Longview Place

Updating this: I was overly critical. Everything I said was true, but things have definitely improved. Overall this place is an incredible value. The views on buildings 70 and 80 and the river side are AMAZING! The maintenance staff and most concierges are incredible. We've had dodgy experiences with the other staff, but overall it's been very good. Like I said, I was critical, but relative to other places, Longview wins hands down.

Longview is the least expensive "luxury" apts in the Boston area (that I know of) and the best value for the money. We looked at all of the other luxury apartments in the area and in Boston including other Equity properties. Equity properties closer into the city go for a lot of money, so we chose Waltham. We did tons of research and checked out lots of properties in person, read reviews all over, and had friends living at a lot of the different places. As of 2010, Longview was definitely the winner. That said, there are issues.

They do rent to college kids (despite originally saying they did not), so each Sept. it gets noisier for a couple months until they settle in and are yelled at a few times. Sometimes during the summer it gets rowdy again. A lot have complained about the noise here, but I find it generally not noisy. Of course, I lived in Allston in the midst of a bunch of BC kids who thought it was fun to throw cinder blocks off the roofs of buildings onto parked cars. So, it's all relative.

They also rent to people with dogs. They don't enforce the dog size limit, although they seem to have cracked down on people picking up after their dogs - it's gotten better as of late. However, be careful about being next to someone with a dog that barks a lot. We did, and it was an issue. Management will work with you and they told us they'd eventually kick the person out if they couldn't improve the situation, but luckily our neighbors just moved out, so not sure if they really would have done that.

Management - while helpful and they will work with you if you're really nice, they're are pretty incompetent and ineffective. For instance, they can't seem to make an excel spreadsheet to track who is assigned what parking space. They have continuously misassigned spaces the 2 years I've lived here, and personally they assigned us 9 spaces (that belonged to other people, so I had to go back and get a request a different one each time) before finally giving us one of their personal spaces just to be sure it was empty. This is not because there were no spaces, this is because they can't keep track of them and who is assigned what. They have lied to us about recycling saying it wasn't available. We later found out they simply needed to purchase the bins from the town, and that the town has been working with them to try and get them to do recycling for about a decade. The price was minimal, but they still just didn't do it. Finally, a month ago they purchased the bins, but they set them up all wrong. They didn't have paper bins and are making residents separate aluminum, plastic, and glass, even though that is not necessary according to local officials. What amazes me about that one is that it's not just laziness, this is incompetence actually creating arbitrary and unnecessary hurdles for residents to jump in order to recycle. Management screwed up our move in date, didn't have the place ready in time, were rude and unhelpful with neighbors who had two large constantly barking dogs, etc. They also screwed up our move out date and over charged us for it, but we actually decided it wasn't worth taking the time to try and explain anything to them. So, the key is, choose your battles, be really really nice to them no matter the situation and how they respond, and if you're patient enough, you'll probably get what you need.

The concierge used to be great. There's a couple great ones remaining, but the rest are from some service. The most basic task they're supposed to do is accept packages. We've had many problems with them doing that - misplacing packages, signing for them but then they can't find them, etc. They have paid for their mistakes though, so that's nice. But, you never know if you might have a package sitting there, so check if you're expecting one but don't get a slip. Have to stay on top of it.

The apt. itself is great and mostly sound. The windows are a bit cheap and let a lot of air through. Hot water has been dodgy at times, but usually good. Appliances are very nice and work. Electricity occasionally does strange things, flickers, and in Waltham there is a general problem it seems. We had our power go out several times last summer, sometimes for several hours.

Neighbors are a mix. In general people are messy, destructive, and inconsiderate - but that's everywhere - that's reality. Longview does a pretty good job at trying to keep up with it and keep things clean - but yeah, there are folks that break things in the common areas, leave trash around, leave trash in the trash room instead of putting it down the chute, etc. Not sure if you can ever get away from that.

Not to focus too much on negatives: garage parking, in winter, is freakin' awesome.

So, altogether, yes there are issues, but in our experience, Longview is the best value at there.


Last updated: 12/20/2011

Recommended: YES Overall Rating

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