I've been out and away from blogging for a while, and a lot has happened in that time.
For starters, I had a meeting with the building manager shortly after my previous post. She's a nice lady, very personable and charming. I'm sure she's well trained in how to convey positive impressions, but even so, I got the feeling she's up to her ears in stupidity when it comes to building maintenance.
She actually had my laundry list of issues in one of those stand-up wire paper holders when I got there. It looked well used and had been highlighted and scribbled on extensively. We went over most of the stuff on it and she talked about the plans and progress on each.
The real problem though is that the building needs money to be renovated, but it needs renters for money, and needs renovation for renters. This is one place where I could see raw capital investment making a big difference.
Since then, various other problems have arisen with the building, but other issues have largely been fixed:
- the heat finally appears to be under control. Except for the coldest days, the heaters are finally cranking out enough heat to keep my apartment warm, though this is with massive cold barriers still in place.
- I had a massive kitchen sink drain and overflow issue, where the pipes draining my kitchen got completely fouled up for a couple of days. I didn't lose anything important, but the cleanup sucked. The maintenance staff did a good job, but even they were near wits end with it. I know how bad plumbing can be; I don't envy what they had to go through to clear the system.
- the elevators have been working properly for the last two weeks. The elevator company replaced the cabling for one of them, but there's still some mechanical weirdness that crops up from time to time. My girlfriend got stuck in one for 20 minutes until maintenance could drop down from above and manually force the door open.
- the laundry room is still hosed up, with a couple of washers having been dead for the last month or longer. The laundry room flooding issue appears to have been resolved for the moment.
There's still a long uphill battle ahead, but there seems to be forward progress. The worst part of it is going to be regaining the faith of the inhabitants; quite frankly, attitudes about the building are not positive.
I think the worst part for me is that I don't see an easy way out of it for the building owners - they're going to have to spend money, and that's all there is to it. I'd personally recommend that they begin renovating one empty apartment per month on the upper floors. Install double pane glass and rework the outer walls, and redo the kitchen and bathroom.
Granted, it will be expensive, but this adds one very rentable apartment per month. These upgraded apartments will also have about half the heating bill of the others. The only problem with this is that I'd guess the payback time to be 2-3 years if you could keep the apartment full; in short, it requires forward investment. There's also the risk that you couldn't keep the apartment full due to things like hot water failures.
I guess we'll have to see.
