Stone House Development

Underwhelmed.

Stone House Development specializes in Section 42 affordable housing. Their properties are beautiful and feature clean modern design with green appliances and in some cases, green energy.
I live in one of these properties, and have acquaintances who have lived in others (Overlook at Hilldale, City Row, and Park Central Apts.). My apartment is very nice. Why only two stars? Because management is subpar regarding these properties. Communication and returned calls from management to both tenants and applicants is a joke. You will have to make several calls to confirm your rent amount, for example (yes, you have to beg them to let them give you money). Other calls are not returned - while it's true that sometimes the problem is resolved, a phone call or a message in return is a basic courtesy I expect even if the problem is corrected. When we moved in, I was shocked that we were allowed to fill in our check-in sheet on our own, but even when we moved into our brand-new apartment and indicated some minor items that already needed repair, nobody acknowledged or communicated with us about this. Important notices about parking, repairs and other major issues are put up the day before your car or your apartment are impacted. In addition, advertising is misleading - you may see on the website that the apartment offers a fitness center, but it's really for the building next door and you have to pay for it, for example. You may be told that you can have a pet, but the building has an unpublished capacity for pets that they don't communicate with you. You get the idea. Additionally, we were told we would have bike racks and storage units, none of which were ready when we moved in. After we'd been living there for about three weeks, they asked us if we wanted a storage unit, even though we'd been waiting for our storage unit to become available from day one.
Meanwhile, management leaves condescending notes on everyone's doors about not leaving garbage outside the apartments and picking up after dogs. Duh. Just because it's affordable housing doesn't mean that the tenants are all irresponsible pigs. Any building will have a couple of bad apples - find them and leave the rest of us alone.
Which leads me to a final point - you might think, oh, this is affordable housing, aren't you expecting too much? Keep in mind that affordable housing under section 42 is not really "affordable" - we pay competitive market rates for our rent. A comparable apartment with similar amenities from Urban Land Interests (which is an excellent management company) within blocks of the Capitol Square would only be 100-200 higher per month, and we aren't even downtown. Companies like Stone House make a good deal of money in terms of tax credits for doing what they do by providing this housing (and whether or not it is truly affordable to the people who really need it is another story). I don't begrudge them making money at all, but because it's "affordable" housing perhaps they don't feel that they need to look after their tenants the way they might otherwise.