Fourth & U Apartments

loredmoon

Leasing team is a complete joke! Total incompetence! From inaudible headsets ("my supervisor is aware") to not responding to emails, to confusing directions, to misinformation. Just totally inept. Which is frustrating. I can't believe the leasing folks are not available on site -- what a joke! I was standing there for ages while they unlocked a door "remotely" -- total nightmare in terms of communication and organization. They had no idea which apartments were available for viewing and sent me to two that were occupied. Maybe they shouldn't be working remotely if they can't even figure out which apartments are available..? I then viewed two apartments that were not clean and had damage. This is the deal, I guess, you get subpar housing at great cost in CA. They also claim that you can't hear the trains when the windows are closed. I don't know. I think this is a crapshoot.

Sara Campbell

DO NOT LIVE HERE. The staff are all nice and are doing their best, I feel kinda bad for them. But Essex Properties in general is a terrible machine designed to take away your money and provide the worst possible experience they can get away with. There are now homeless camps surrounding the building and security issues are crazy. Half of the packages that I got delivered to my home were stolen in the mail room. I lost TWO locked bikes from the bike room. A friend visited and got his bike stolen too. Definitely never use the bike room! And still, the management refused to ever install a camera. Saw a car right outside the building propped up on blocks with all the tires stolen outside. You might think oh, right next to bougie 4th street, it's a nice area. Wrong. Definitely occasionally had to step over human poop on my way out the building in the morning. Also, I hope you like having to step over dog poop on your way to your apartment! You'd think that if you were paying almost $3000/month for a 1 bedroom apartment, they could hire more staff to clean up after bad residents (or at least install cameras). The whole building was infested with fruit flies too. Taking out the compost was always pretty disgusting, had to throw the bag in quick and then dodge the cloud of flies that would emerge from the building's compost bin. The trash and recycling chutes were often backed up for days without anyone taking care of them, and they smelled horrible. Nothing like getting back from a long travel day in the pouring rain, after business hours, and getting soaked to the bone because there was another "problem" with your key fob. They "accidentally" cancelled my access to the building TWICE in a year and it was difficult to restore, because they needed to see you and your key during business hours, which is hard when you are working. Finally, after doing a walkthrough with us and telling us that the place looked fine, they charged us $500 for a carpet replacement. The carpet was FINE. We know for a fact that there was NO pet urine on the carpet and no reason to replace it other than Essex gouging us for money. Again, this is nothing against the actual employees, who are just regular people trying to survive in the Bay Area. But I will never live anywhere managed by the terrible Essex Properties machine again.

Brad Johnson

The apartment itself was quite nice, good appliances and washer/dryer in unit. The staff that work there (especially the maintenance guys Effren and Ron!) are all wonderful. That is about all the good I can say about this place. If you are expecting a package to be delivered, expect it to get stolen if you aren't home to collect it right away. If you lock a bike in the locked bike room, expect it to get stolen. You can complain to them, and they say they are working with the police on the issue, but they clearly do not care about it. After personally having 3 bikes stolen from there, and knowing a few other residents who also had bikes stolen there is still no camera installed in the bike room (WTF?!). Don't expect your neighbors to clean up after their pets, this goes both inside and outside the building. The number of times we saw trails of piss leading from an apartment door outside was many. The number of times we found dog feces in the hallway was also quite high. If your apartment faces into the courtyard, expect piss smells coming into the apartment from outside on warm days also. And all of this for ONLY $2800 month for the tiniest one bedroom apartment I have ever lived in.

Tess

The maintenance guy is nice but the whole place is dirty and the hallways and elevators stink. The units have cheap/low quality appliances, paint, fixtures, etc. And the layout/plan of the building (placement of staircases, elevators, courtyards etc.) is honestly bizarre and inconvenient. The male leasing manager that the company hired for 4th and U last year is not very nice on the phone and probably just bad at his job. Also..... the trains are extremely loud and they run right next to the building throughout the night so you just have to get used to being woken up at all hours (I never could). Not to mention the homeless people always digging through the trash around the building and leaving a big mess outside.