Reside on Barry

I really liked living here — can’t complain about anything except internet. There is a nice gym, very well maintained common areas with grills, oven, dishwasher; beautiful lobby with coffee machine, computers, printer/​scanner, TVs etc. Mike and Laura are great, very helpful and nice…

Wherever you see «reside,» just replace it with «raise rents,» e.g. «Raise rents on Barry.» Or «Raise rents on Surf.»
If Reside assimilates your building next, get out. Renovations are like slapping a band-​aid over an a**hole and then nearly doubling rents. Oh wow. Pergo flooring. You shouldn’t have. Seriously, you shouldn’t have.
Apt manager will retaliate against bad feedback or calling the city or alderman or even contacting Reside and going over her head by refusing to renew your lease, be careful, I’ve heard so many stories. Complain anonymously. Leave reviews when you’re safely gone. I waited until now to tell you how much this company sucks so I could be sure I left on MY terms.
Hope you enjoy 6MB satellite internet with a half meg upload cap for $$$$$$$$ with their monopoly fake cable company. No Comcast. No RCN. Can’t get DSL any faster than that either. AT&T will give you a whopping 6 down, 1 up. I have to tether through my phone to get a fast enough connection to do my job. There may be CLEC DSL providers out there but just find a building with RCN or Comcast.
Oh and the goddamned elevators. You will spend a half hour a week or more waiting for one. I’m never moving into a building without a dedicated service elevator again because they shut #2 down all day for movers.
There are 3 Merkai wifi access points on every floor and if wifi is enabled on your phone they’re tracking your movements throughout your unit and building. How stupid do you think we are? And yet these Merkai-​scanning access points do not provide Internet, hmmm.
For all the «improvements» that they think makes this place worth several thousand a month, one of them was not on the infrastructure or Internet. Yeah it looks nice: eye roll: but I’ve been here longer than they have and life was better to say nothing of affordable before Reside, old cabinets and all. We had a doorman. They minded their own business. At least back then the yuppie scum who overran the place would have cringed in horror at the Formica countertops and 80s cabinets and stayed in Lincoln Park with their strollers where they belong. You pretty much have to be yuppie scum to live here anymore.
Then again if you’re pushing your stroller around the building and gushing OMG Pergo maybe this is is the place for you. See you in eviction court during the next recession!

Such a shame. We loved parking at Reside On Barry, but the woman in the office treated us like absolute garbage because we weren’t renters at the building. We bought a new car, and just stopped by to update the license plate and make/​model info, and to inquire about getting an extra garage opener because we’re sharing the car, and the woman told us absolutely not because we weren’t renters at Reside and that she didn’t care if they lost our business because they have a year-​long waiting list for the garage.
Really sad to see someone in our neighborhood (we live literally around the corner on Wellington) treat her neighbors this way. My husband and I have both worked in customer service for a long time and would NEVER treat our clients like this. Even if we’re only getting $ 200/​month from them (which is an outrageous rate anyways for a parking spot!). Our building only charges $ 100 for parking and they are much nicer. We’ll just deal with street parking until that waiting list runs up instead of being treated like trash.
STAY AWAY FROM THIS BUILDING!

Do not move into this building. For the rent we pay we are forced to deal with the worst communications company on the planet. Get it together Reside. Does your contract with MDU not have a performance clause? Have your attorney’s terminate the contract as I will be terminating my lease!

To update, some things have gotten better such as the elevators, the office giving notice prior to closing early and the construction (at least for this year) seems to have abated. The horrible cable/​internet situation has not improved but the upside is MDU Communications (MDTV) is on the brink of bankruptcy (as of 9÷27÷13 their stock price is $ 0.12). If MDU becomes insolvent Reside will have no choice but to replace them. Hopefully this will be with a legitimate cable/​internet provider such as Comcast, RCN or AT&T. The downside is when asked Reside doesn’t have a plan for this which means the residents will likely lose service for a period of time. Considering the improvements I’m upgrading one star. Once the cable/​internet situation is resolved a further upgrade will be considered.

I would give this place –100 stars if I could because I’ve had a terrible experience with this company every since they bought my building.
I lived here several years before Reside took over, and I loved it. I was kind of bitter when I found out a huge corporate company was taking over, but I wanted to give them a chance because they were going to make some much needed improvements and upgrades to the building.
Sure, there’s a nice gym and they made the deck into a great place to entertain. Unfortunately, none of that was worth it for the trouble they’ve put my husband and me through. That fancy new common room was actually the on-​site maintenance man’s apartment. They kicked him and his family out to put in a some weird psychedelic waiting room that smells like a cheap vanilla candle. They painted everything white and it’s already starting to fleck away. They covered the beautiful brick exterior with a weird wooden panel and put the address of the building in glowing numbers that are a full story high. It looks horrible!
I had my birthday party on the new patio which was wonderful. That is until some weird security guard came out and started yelling at my and my guests that he was going to arrest us for trespassing. I had to find the confirmation email to prove I had gone through the appropriate channels to rent the space. My guests were so freaked out though that they left. When I informed the leasing office the next morning, they knew nothing about it!!! The security they made me hire through their third-​party company never showed up, and they had no idea why this other security guard threatened me. To this day, they never explained why my party was ruined.
Then there’s John, the guy in the leasing office. He made it clear from the beginning that the long-​time residents were not his priority. He waited until we signed another lease before he started nickle and diming us over every little thing. We couldn’t ever get a hold of him and our packages were constantly held hostage in the leasing office. They brought Lauren in which made everything a lot more pleasant (I like her), but he’s still a jackass.
The icing on the cake is when they refused to let us resign our lease unless we agreed to let them renovate our apartment and jack up our rent several hundred dollars. We were worried about this from the beginning, but they promised us they wouldn’t kick us out so we didn’t try to move. I knew we should never have believed them. When we went to John to ask him what the deal was, all he said was that management changed their minds.
So, in summation, do NOT live in this building. I don’t know whether this is reflective of the entire Reside corporation or if it’s just this building, but I will NEVER give Reside Living another penny.