Paco Realty Corporation

I long for negative 21 thousand stars.
(For the record, I lived with the other reviewer)
We moved into Central Square in 1998, before the gentrification really swung into high gear. I think we moved there because it was close to Manray and the rent was cheap. When I planted some sunflowers in the backyard I overturned some needles and crack vials.
Ann L forgot to mention that the detritus in the back stair well was secured there with tar. It vanished a few days before the arson fire that rendered us homeless. We called them for years to get the tar riddled back stairwell cleaned up to no avail, and then days before the fire that would’ve killed the 3^rd and 4^th floor tenants had it not been accessible as it had been for 2+ years, suddenly it was. Considering we couldn’t get them to replace lightbulbs in the front hallway without hounding them for 3+ weeks, and couldn’t get them front door lock replaced for a few months, it should’ve been a warning when suddenly the back stairwell was cleared out.
She also forgot to mention that in addition to the car in the basement, we had squatters. And that we had to lock the back door with a pitchfork.

I long for zero stars.
As landlords/​property managers, they were middle of the road, edging towards lousy — we lived in a building that was renovated on the cheap to take advantage of the recent repeal of rent control in Cambridge back in 1998. Lousy insulation (high heating bills), little-​to-​no maintenance (back stairwell and fire exit was filled with old furniture and junk), but nothing especially obscene, and we paid below-​market rent. Also there was an entire car in the basement, and my roommate turned over some syringes when she tried to plant sunflowers in the backyard. Ah, college days!
After about two years of living there, there was a major fire in the building. Nobody was hurt*, and most tenants got off lucky in terms of property damage, but the entire building was condemned as a result. The circumstances of the fire were sketchy, as was some of Paco’s behavior leading up to it (they switched everyone over to tenancy at will, which took effect a week or so before the fire, and cleared out that back stairwell at about the same time.) I heard secondhand that the realty company was charged with setting the fire, but can’t confirm that. I’ll just say that there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting that I was burned out of my apartment during the hottest rental market Boston has seen in the last decade-​plus by my very own landlord.
But what really seals the deal is this: A few weeks after the fire, once my roommates and I had rescued all our belongings and found temporary housing, I got around to getting in touch with the realty company to get our security deposit back. They wouldn’t just cut us a check, and insisted on someone physically coming to the office. When I took an afternoon off of work to go over there, I got the privilege of being yelled at for what felt like hours by a woman who insisted that even though the building was CONDEMNED, we shouldn’t get our lousy twelve hundred bucks back because we painted the walls in a couple of rooms.
To summarize: needles in the backyard, arson, homelessness, and a landlord so fucking stingy and callous and unprofessional that when we finally did get the deposit back, they held back rent covering the few days of the month before the fire and didn’t give us the interest on the deposit we were owed by law. Thanks, guys!
* Holy shit, I didn’t know this — was just looking up old Cambridge news and found out that 3 firemen were injured! I had the flu when it all went down and was doped to the skies, so it’s no surprise that I totally missed that at the time.