Review for The Pier Apartments

PLEASE don't be fooled like we were. It looks nice on the outside, and it's easy to be impressed by the big kitchens and great views. This place is an absolute dive! The building managers are either working with a woefully small maintenance budget or they are just complete morons. I suspect it's both and this makes for a highly unsatisfying and frustrating rental experience. And the rent is not inexpensive! The building is very cheaply made and this is evident in the numerous and continuous problems we've witnessed. Here's just a sampling of the constant issues we and the other residents deal with on a regular basis.
The Fire alarm system is constantly going off in the middle of the night for no reason. Of 7+ middle of the night alarms only one was genuine for a small kitchen fire. There is an added bonus of the east end of the garage flooding when the sprinkler system goes off drenching the bottom floor and flooding the garage.
We've had multiple (8+) hot water outages over the past year and each time the office assures us it's been fixed.
The elevators are slower you can possibly imagine for an 8 story building yet broken all the time. Why? because they were built with a cheap hydraulic system that is no longer made. So parts & maitenance are difficult if not impossible to find.
Parking spaces in the garage (which you must pay $175 on top of rent) are so small you can barely fit a compact vehicle so people regularly take up two spaces. The garage ceiling is built so low if you have a taller car or SUV, you'd better check to see if it actually fits in the garage. The office threatens to tow people who park in two spots but are too stupid to realize you can't fit a standard tow truck in the garage due to the low ceilings. So nothing ever happens.
The air conditioning is permanently broken or purposefully turned off in the gym. Even after multiple requests to fix it. With floor to ceiling windows that room gets up 88 degrees or higher in the summer. It becomes completely unusable.
The AC & heating system in the apartments is also an incredibly cheap dual system. This means that maintenance has to come into your apartment in the fall and spring to change over the system to turn on the heat or AC. As if that's not inconvenient enough, instead of making it a regular and scheduled maintenance task for all apartments they wait until you actually need the heat or AC, can't turn it on and finally end up calling the office to make a maintenance request.
And then let's talk about maintenance requests, if not an emergency we have regularly waited 2+ weeks with no response from the office or maintenance to our requests. We then have to personally go into the office (not convenient unless the weekend) to again demand the request be taken care of. Once that happens they are suddenly very attentive.
The walls are so thin we can hear what our neighbors are watching on TV and saying to each other. If your bedroom shares a wall with a living room in the next apartment prepare to be disturbed constantly.
And please don't assume this is a secure building because they have a concierge, they NEVER check to see if you are a resident. As long as you smile and say hi you can go straight to the main elevators. Anyone can walk into this building.
PLEASE don't be fooled by the freshly painted walls and new carpet in the hallways, they put a pretty facade on a building that is completely falling apart. To add insult to injury they try to raise your rent when you renew your lease. This coupled with the fact that management is completely incompetent makes this the biggest rip off on the water. There are dozens of newly built luxury apartments in Jersey city - look elsewhere!