947-57 West Cornelia Avenue

I’ve rented a 1b/1ba at 947-57 W Cornelia for 1.5 years now, and it’s been mostly fine. Overpriced? Yes, but it’s a nice little space.

The unit was super clean at move-in. Kemal, the building “engineer” is alright, he can be annoying but just be assertive with him and you’ll get what you need.

No issues with bugs/roaches or rodents.

The toilet is sooo slow and quick to back up, but water pressure in the shower is great for an older building.

Baseboard heaters are a huge PITA. For such a small space, it’s impossible to keep the place adequately warm during the deep freezes, and my ComEd bill was ridiculous. Give me radiators any day.

I’ve never had an issue with neighbors, everyone is polite and respectful with noise, guests, etc.

Laundry an ungodly $2.99 per load, and there’s always at least one or two machines broken or don’t work well. The laundry room is in the basement and gnarly as hell

Bottom line, I’ve had a fine experience. I promise I’m not a Beal shill, I totally believe the complaints and negligence reported by other tenants, past and present, around the city. I think I just got really lucky. My last rental from Bil-Mar was literally full of felons, animal abusers, drug users/dealers, and cockroaches, so take that context for what you will.

For anyone like me that found this website before move-in but AFTER signing your lease, I would say don’t panic, can be fine and normal. If not, God bless ya.

Living in this apartment (951 W Cornelia) was a sh!t show from start to finish. Let’s begin.

Looking For Apartments (August 2022)

– We found the apartment on apartments.com and sent a message through their portal. We were put in touch with a realtor who started trying to set up tours of the apartment. This realtor must have quit immediately after we showed interest, because we got a call from a different person the next day. We had lots of questions because half of the pictures on apartments.com looked really crummy and the other half looked nice. Obviously, we were only interested in the nice units, so we really needed to tour to confirm. But it should be noted that we were desperate to just get a roof over our heads and everyone in the city moves on August 1. What we heard from the realtor was that the current tenants were unwilling to show their apartment, and she had to go through Kamal (the building manager) to even communicate with them. She also told us that she already had people submitting applications for this place, so if we wanted it, we would need to apply ASAP. Like I said, we were desperate, so we applied and signed the lease in the same day, sight unseen, trusting this realtor that it was one of the nicer apartments in this building. Approximately 48 hours after signing the lease, miss realtor told us that she was able to set up a tour. So we showed up at the tour time, bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to see what we had paid for. But she wasn’t able to get keys! Because the property manager wasn’t there, Beal obviously didn’t give her any, and the tenants either weren’t home or didn’t answer. So that sucked. After two weeks (TWO WEEKS AFTER SIGNING THE LEASE) we were able to tour. We walked in to a smoke filled room that was clearly one of the dingier apartments. Listen, I am not one to judge, but if I knew strangers were coming to see my apartment, I wouldn’t be hitting a bong with my friends at that moment.

Moving In

The actual moving in wasn’t bad- we showed up at the correct time, Kamal gave us our keys (saying a few might not work), and we moved in our stuff. Once we were settled, we sent a maintenance request through the Beal portal with a few things that weren’t working: the hall closet doors weren’t on hinges and our shower head was taped on. Weird that they weren’t fixed before we moved in, but whatever, right? The shower head was changed within 24 hours of that request, so we were like, damn! What a great management group! How long did it take for someone to put the doors on our closet? THREE MONTHS! LOL!

The Last Twelve Months

During our time here, any maintenance requests were ignored. The property manager was impossible to reach (by call and text). When we tried to go above him to Beal admin, the person who answered the main line was so kind: we’re sorry we missed your request, that sucks that the washing machine doesn’t work, ridiculous that your property manager isn’t texting you back, yada yada. Then they would tell me that the person who directly oversees my apartment in their office was on a lunch break and couldn’t talk to me, but would call me back. Plot twist: she didn’t. I tried calling at 10am, 1pm, 3pm, 4:45pm- always on a lunch break. The desk person gave me her email, but she never emailed me back. I genuinely think I reached out so much that they just started ignoring me because I was too annoying.

Every time I interacted with one of my neighbors, the whole conversation was about how much we hate living here and how we can’t wait to move. When we first moved in and were begging people to let us into our building, they would say “yeah you’ll regret living here.” We just got new neighbors upstairs and one of them came up behind me while I was trying to unlock our building door. I moved out of the way and said “oh, do your keys work?” and she said “nope! my husband is coming down to let me in”

Be F$cking For Real

– The property manager literally warned us, but our keys consistently didn’t work. My fiancé’s key could get into the laundry room, but not the door to our building. My key could get us into the building, but not the laundry room. Neither of our keys worked for the front gate. The back gate was constantly unlocked (which made me feel so secure living in a high traffic tourist area), so that’s how we got in. Unless we waited for someone to let us in the front gate/building. Evenetually an old woman told us the pin # for the front gate (which we didn’t even know existed), so we were able to start using that. We texted Kamal and emailed Beal asking for new keys, and they said “we didn’t change the locks so you can’t have new keys”

– In September, we started noticing the issues with the mail. We weren’t getting letters and our packages arrived way later than the “delivered” date (if we even got them at all). We talked to Kamal, and he said go to the post office. I go to the post office, they tell me to go to the USPS carrier annex (it’s like the main mail building).

Visit to the Annex #1-They asked if our names were on the inside of our mailbox. F!cking obviously, they already were. We asked if they had our mail, and they said “oh your delivery person is already out en route, so you should get it today” (we did not)

Visit to Annex #2 (October)- I asked where our mail was and the person told me that the carrier had reported that our mailbox didn’t work and told me to talk to our landlord. I said, well then do you have our mail, and she said, no it’s already en route. BFFR.

Visit to Annex #3 (November)- At this point, the mail carrier started leaving notes on our mailboxes that are like “this is a crime, fix the GD mailboxes.” by this time, I’ve submitted multiple maintenance requests, I’ve called and texted Kamal, I’ve called Beal, and I’ve thought about calling the City, because this is not okay. I get to the annex for the third time, right as they open, and the clerk is able to put three months of mail in my hands- wedding invitations, checks, health insurance information, two credit cards. Thank god.

Around the end of November/start of December, I see Kamal replacing our mailboxes. Great! We can get mail again! WRONG. We didn’t get keys to the new mailboxes until a week later. The method of delivery? Left loose outside of our unit doors: no label that it was a mail key, no email to let us know they were coming, nothing. But we put our names in the mailbox and started getting mail. Do we still only have a 50% success rate with having packages not getting stolen. Yes.

– We have five washers and five dryers in the laundry room. Three washers work consistently well, one is hit or miss, and one literally doesn’t work at all. Other tenants have left signs and notes, I’m certainly not the only one who texted Kamal and sent a maintenance request, but it did not get fixed. In a year. For the dryers, two of them work great, the rest you have to run your clothes through twice, even if it’s a tiny load. OH, not to mention that it costs $3 PER LOAD.

– Our unit has an intercom thing on the wall. Doesn’t work, we can’t buzz anyone in through the gate or our main door. On top of that, our name isn’t even in the directory in the call box by our gate. So we just give our friends the code that one random lady gave us to get them in.

– Twice we’ve had a leaky sink and one time a repair person did actually answer the maintenance request. But he didn’t even fix it. He said “it’s all good!” but it just kept leaking. So we figured out how to fix it for ourselves, because no way was he coming back.

– Honorable mentions: tenants not picking up their dogs shit, 0 cameras on site, making sure that someone is home for them to come and do checks/measurements and then not showing up, only two of our stove burners work without us using a lighter, the radiator in our bathroom doesn’t work, there is so much visible water damage in our kitchen, and items on shelves need to be perfectly balanced so that the shelves don’t collapse because they only have 3/4 of the pegs that hold them in.

My Fiancé Wanted Me to Share Good Things About Our Apartment

– no bugs or rats

– water worked (except for two days out of our year long lease)

– the heaters that work, work well

– great location

– I have a small back porch area I can smoke on (not that the light out there works, I have to take a flashlight, but it exists)

– the courtyard is quite nice (when people pick up their pets shit)

I’m exhausted from writing this. So just don’t move into a Beal apartment.

I lived in a Beal building (957 W Cornelia) for 2 years and could not wait for my lease to terminate so I could get out. My apartment only had electric floorboard heating, which is designed for supplemental heating, though Beal passed that off as acceptable. It cost a fortune to pay the electric bill over the winter, with the heaters turned up to the maximum level and my apartment would remain under 60 degrees (F) despite Beal emailing residents reminding us to keep our apartments heated. I had several maintenance requests submitted that took weeks and several repeated phonecalls to have anyone come look, often even when they’d come they would “fix” it and then it would return to it’s previous state but it wasn’t even worth the energy to try to get maintenance back again. Any time I hear of someone looking to rent from Beal I discourage it, you could not pay me to live with Beal.