Heather A.
Yelp
PART 1 OF THIS REVIEW:
I moved out of the Monroe last month after 1 year. It is the worst building I have ever lived in... so bad that it's hard to know where to start. It's literally a scam... DO NOT LIVE THERE.
Security is atrocious. Germantown is a nice neighborhood but close to some rough areas. The Monroe's management apparently believes the building is located in a suburban town from a 1950s movie. Doors and gates were constantly broken, without any announcement from the building or any projected resolution. There are two gates to get into the garage. One broke about a month after I moved in. The building's response was to just leave the gate wide open for anyone to walk in and out. That started a string of car robberies and the theft of an actual vehicle. I would walk to my car and see glass all over the floors from windows being smashed in. The gate was fixed about a month later but was broken literally that evening, clearly by the people who had gotten so used to breaking into our cars. In response, the Monroe management sent an email to residents accusing US of breaking it -- they said in the email that they were reviewing the security cameras and "punish or evict" whoever it was that broke the gate. As if we would damage our own property... It was ridiculously rude and misguided. That gate never got fixed again for the remaining months that I lived in the building.
Later, the other garage gate broke. The solution again that time was just to leave the gate wide open. Car robberies persisted again, as well as bike robberies. Complaints to management were unanswered.
Even worse is that the alarm system within the garage is broken. You are supposed to have to swipe your key fob to get inside the building from the garage, but literally half the alarms are broken. So, if you can get yourself into the garage, you can literally wander the entire building freely. During the periods of time where the garage doors were broken, I saw numerous suspicious people in the hallways who clearly were not residents and felt extremely unsafe in the building. Again, all complaints went unanswered.
One night, I returned home from a late flight and saw an apartment on the first floor with a door facing the street wide open. I walked past it on the way to the door and noticed that it was a vacant apartment. I walked into the apartment to its front door, which was unlocked, so I was able to enter the building freely without using any key fob or key. In other words, a vacant apartment had just been left completely wide open in the middle of the night for anyone to wander into the Monroe. I called the front desk the next morning because this incident was extremely concerning. The response from the front desk was to raise her voice to me and say, "Well, what do you want me to do about that?". After a few minutes of ARGUING with me, when I literally was just a concerned tenant who was reporting a security incident, I had to remind her that as the landlord, her company owes legal duties to its tenants that they are not meeting and are reportable to the state. She became pretty apologetic after that... clearly thinking she'd lose her job.
Security incidents also ensued in the package room. One day when looking for a package, I noticed that there were numerous packages throughout the room that were open and empty -- clearly, someone had been going through packages, opening them, and taking the contents. I had one package that came in an amazon wrapper that was cut open at the bottom, with the goods stolen through the hole. I went to report this to the front desk. The woman there said she'd look into it... but she then proceeded to grab a post-it, write the work "package" on it, then look at me and say, "so... is there something else you need?" As if it was so inconvenient that I was standing there waiting for her to take some form of action other than writing the single word "package" on a post-it...
Speaking of the package room, it's a complete disaster. Packages are piled up everywhere, and it can take up to 20 min. to find your delivery. The packages are supposed to be placed on particular shelves, but they never are. Management does not go in and try to assist.
There are numerous other issues in the interior of the building as well. There are gnats all over everyone's units. Not just a few fruit flies in the summer... serious infestations of large gnats. They follow you around the apartment, land on your food, etc. When you ask the front desk what they are doing about it, they instruct YOU to purchase bug catching devices for your unit. They do not pay for them.
See next review for PART 2.