Longview is the least expensive "luxury" apts in the Boston area (that I know of) and a pretty good deal for the money relatively speaking. That said, there are a lot of issues.

They do rent to college kids, so each Sept. it gets noisier for a couple months until they settle in and are yelled at a few times. A lot of 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. 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) before finally giving us one of their personal spaces. This is not because there were no spaces, this is because they can't keep track of them. 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. What amazes me about that one is that it's not just laziness, this is going out of their way to be incompetent and setup arbitrary hurdles for residents to jump. They 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. So, the key is, be really really nice to them even though they don't deserve it, and really try and work with them, and maybe, just maybe you'll be able to get what you need.

The concierge used to be great. There's one great one remaining, but the rest is this 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.

The apt. itself is 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.

So, altogether, yeah, a lot of suck, but relatively speaking it ain't that bad. And, if you get an apt. with a view of the river it's really quite nice. I do, so, it's worth the money.

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