Maintenance delays, lockouts and a bag of weed: HERE Pittsburgh residents share living struggles one year later

Following a semester-long construction delay, HERE Pittsburgh, a modern student-centered apartment building on Forbes Avenue, fully opened its doors to all residents by December 2023. But one year into the apartment’s existence, residents have reported a litany of issues that they say have impacted their well-being and made them regret signing a lease.

HERE Pittsburgh describes itself as a “community that uniquely combines edgy vibes, iconic design and classic college experiences.” The building contains 593 beds and offers one-, two- and three-bedroom units and studios. 

Extended delays in maintenance requests getting serviced, defective technology locking residents out of their rooms, holes in walls that cause privacy concerns and finding a bag of drugs upon moving in have residents frustrated. Some say the disappointments they’ve had over the past year have made them rethink signing a lease with HERE.

Delays in receiving maintenance

Multiple HERE residents have reported lengthy waits for maintenance requests to be addressed and inadequate repairs once they were resolved.

Nala Gallaher, a junior communications major and current HERE resident, moved into her two-bedroom apartment with her roommate in late October 2023. She said they were some of the first people to sign a lease with HERE, and after waiting an extra two months to move into her apartment due to construction delays, she said she encountered problems “the second [she] stepped in the door.”

When Gallaher went to do a load of laundry, the washing machine would not start. She and her roommate filled out requests to have maintenance fix the washing machine.

In the meantime, Gallaher and her roommate washed their laundry by driving 30 minutes east to Gallaher’s parents’ house in Monroeville. They repeated this cycle for about a month until maintenance workers repaired her washing machine.

However, these repairs only partially fixed the problem.

Gallaher said the washer would sometimes run properly, but other times would leave her clothes “very damp” and in a “puddle of water.”

The two submitted maintenance requests again, prompting building maintenance to replace her washing machine entirely in November 2023.

With a new washing machine, Gallaher ran her first successful wash a month after moving in. But she quickly discovered a new problem — her apartment’s dryer did not work. Since her washing machine had never been fully functional, Gallaher had never attempted to use the dryer.

“After all this waiting, after they move the goalposts in terms of moving in a bazillion times, and now I have all this broken stuff,” Gallaher said. “[HERE fixes] it, and it breaks again, and it’s just very infuriating because it’s like, what is wrong with this stuff for it to break this much? Is this made out of cardboard? I don’t understand.”

Gallaher and her roommate tried hang-drying their clothes with modest success, ultimately opting to make the 30-minute drive and do complete loads of laundry at her parents’ house. Although the two submitted maintenance requests to get their dryer repaired in November, it wasn’t fixed until March 2024.

In between filling out maintenance requests, Gallaher and her roommate decided to re-sign a lease with HERE for this year but said she now wishes she found a different apartment.

“The only reason we really did it was because we expected most of these issues to be resolved and be finished at this point,” Gallaher said. “We were like, ‘Maybe it will be better in a few months.’ There’s that kind of hope that kept us staying there.”

Gallaher described her time at HERE as “disappointing and a letdown.”

“It should be great, it looks great, it’s modern, it has all this cool stuff, and then it turns out that all the cool stuff really isn’t worth it because none of it works,” Gallaher said. “I probably would have been better off in a dorm. Yeah, it would have been noisy, but frankly, I wouldn’t have to worry about half the stuff not working.”

Requests for comment from The Pitt News were referred to a communications director at Article, HERE Pittsburgh’s parent company. Responses were asked to be attributed to the HERE Pittsburgh management team.

The management team said the delays to replace residents’ brand-new appliances were because they were still under warranty. They did not answer how many total appliances had to be replaced upon residents moving in.

“Because of this warranty, we made sure to follow manufacturer protocols, which led to a longer wait period for replacements/repairs. We worked as quickly as possible to remedy these issues and can report that these have been addressed,” HERE’s management team said.

Grace Bear, a junior psychology major and current HERE resident, said she experienced similarly slow responses to maintenance requests.

Bear and her roommate were drawn in by HERE’s newness and signed the lease with high expectations. But she became progressively more disappointed as she waited until December to move into her apartment due to construction delays.

Upon moving in, Bear discovered her washing machine was also broken. It took maintenance two weeks to replace the appliance, which only lasted one month before breaking again due to a venting issue, according to Bear. She also noticed some small scratches on some walls and a few small spots of dried paint on the floors. Since Bear was the first tenant to live in this unit, she believed these damages were a result of management’s rush to get tenants moved in before the end of the fall semester.

Bear and other residents noted complications with the trash chutes that began at the beginning of the fall semester as well. Each floor’s trash room has two chutes where residents can drop their garbage, but every chute was locked at the start of the semester, according to Bear, leading to a build-up of trash on each floor. The HERE Pittsburgh management team denied that the garbage chutes were locked.

“It is a current policy to discourage (but not lock) the use of chutes during move-in to eliminate high volume or inappropriate materials going into the chutes that cause clogging,” they said.

Bear said her floor’s trash room was “filled almost to the ceiling [and] pressed to the door.”

“The smell was literally infiltrating our rooms,” Bear, who lives a few doors down from the trash room, said. “It was disgusting, I could not imagine opening that and adding more to it. The smell was so bad in our apartment.”

The management team said they “maintain that this is a good process” and “now have a plan to increase our trash removal” during move-ins.

Bear said it took two days for management to clear the rooms of the trash, but the smell persisted for longer.

“At this point, I’m kind of used to the bullshit,” Bear said. “For how much we pay a month, that’s not acceptable.”

As of Dec. 5, rent at HERE costs between $1,439 and $2,409 per month depending on the room. In the 15213 ZIP code, which comprises most of Oakland, median rent ranges between $1,103 for studios and $2,248 for three-bedroom apartments, according to Zillow Rentals data.

Unexpected lockouts

Ken Parker, a junior marketing major, has lived at HERE since last fall. He took a gap year as a first-year student and returned to Pitt in the spring of 2023, but without guaranteed on-campus housing, Parker struggled to find an apartment as many were already leased. He found HERE and signed a lease for a studio apartment after HERE showed him apartment layouts via virtual reality.

After living at HERE for the past year, Parker said he believes their business practices are “very predatory” and called the apartment building “a terrible place.”

“I think that they know that we’re students, and most of us haven’t had an apartment before this [and] don’t really have the resources to really fight anything,” Parker said. “It seems like they deliberately target students and take advantage of students in that way.”

In response to Parker’s statement, the HERE Pittsburgh management team emphasized that they “receive all reports seriously and investigate any incidents to the furthest extent possible.”

“Our number one priority is to provide high-quality student housing,” they said.

Due to the construction delays, Parker lived in three different hotels before moving into his apartment near the end of October 2023. Although he faced some living complications such as a broken dishwasher and a front door without a deadbolt, Parker said living at HERE “genuinely wasn’t terrible” and signed a new lease for a one-bedroom apartment in February of this year. But after faulty technology locked him out of his room several times, Parker said it was a “mistake” to sign another lease with HERE.

Around 11 p.m. on Sept. 6, Parker said he was on the way to exercise in the apartment’s gym when he realized he forgot his water bottle, prompting him to turn around and return to his room. However, when he tapped his key fob on his door, it wouldn’t unlock. Parker said the lock had done this before and usually fixed itself after a few minutes, so he didn’t think much of it and left. When Parker returned around midnight, he found the key fob still wouldn’t unlock his door.

Parker dialed HERE’s maintenance and 24/7 emergency lines about “15 to 20 times,” but nobody answered either line. Having classes in the morning, Parker called a locksmith and paid them a $300 fee to unlock his door.

Since property manager Morgan Cotner was on vacation, Parker approached assistant building manager Autumn Moses the next morning, explained his experience and asked to be reimbursed $300. Moses told him HERE’s lock contractor would look at his lock and he’d get reimbursed when Cotner returned from vacation.

About one week later, Parker faced the same problem again after returning from an afternoon class. He stood at his door, used his key fob and it wouldn’t unlock. Parker ultimately redialed the locksmith, costing him another $300.

The next day, he confronted Moses. She admitted that she didn’t call the lock contractor after his first lockout, apologized and called the contractor that day. In response to Parker’s situation, the HERE Pittsburgh management team said, “We take lockouts seriously and work to ensure each one is responded to expediently.” Parker said the contractors recoded his lock and gave him a new key fob.

On Sept. 18, Parker returned to his room and found his key fob, once again, would not open his door. This marked the third time Parker’s key fob would not unlock his apartment door.

He called the 24/7 emergency line but did not get a response, so he resorted to calling the employee working the line’s personal phone number. They sent a maintenance worker to Parker’s door who said they couldn’t unlock it and recommended he call a locksmith, costing Parker another $300.

HERE’s management team said “there have been minimal issues of this nature” at the apartments, but would not say exactly how many other residents have experienced lockouts like Parker. They also encouraged residents to call their after-hours on-call service instead of a locksmith.

Now down $900, Parker said he asked Cotner, who had returned from vacation, to have his door’s lock changed. Cotner denied Parker’s request, instead opting to have a maintenance worker replace a battery in his lock.

“I was like, ‘I don’t think replacing the batteries in the lock is going to fix the problem,’” Parker said. “[The maintenance worker] goes, ‘I know it’s not going to fix the problem. I don’t know why I’m doing this, but she told me to come do this.’”

When Parker asked Cotner about getting reimbursed $900 for the locksmith fees, Parker said Cotner directed him to fill out a series of forms to get reimbursed in gift cards. But she added a caveat: HERE would not reimburse Parker for the third lockout.

“She’s like, ‘Well, since we came out and tried to fix it, technically reimbursing you would be a courtesy,’” Parker said. “I lost my shit. I was just like, these people owe me $900. Now they’re saying, ‘No, I’m not gonna reimburse you for this third time you got locked out.’”

Parker told Cotner at the time that the situation was “unacceptable.”

“You need to pay me what I’m owed because this is your problem and you are not supplying me a fit place to live,” Parker said. “I get it, the contractor came out and they didn’t fix the door, but at the end of the day, it is still your responsibility to make sure that I’m actually able to live in my apartment.”

According to the HERE Pittsburgh management team, they said “the issue has been resolved” and have been in contact with Parker to reimburse him “in full.” Parker could not be reached for comment.

Weed in the cabinet, hole in the ceiling

A current HERE resident and Pitt student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, moved into their 10th-floor apartment in December 2023 and was “dumbfounded” to find a stranger’s phone and a bag of marijuana in their kitchen cabinet within a few minutes of moving in.

The resident said they contacted management “immediately,” prompting Cotner to visit their room and investigate the situation. Cotner speculated who the items might belong to, confiscated them and left. They said they never received any updates from HERE regarding the phone or weed.

The resident does not plan on resigning a lease with HERE, comparing their experience at the apartment building with their prior experience living in South Oakland.

“If you’re comparing it to South O houses, I’d say [sign a lease]. But if you don’t want to be inconvenienced, don’t do it,” they said. “You might as well pay less and get a little bit less than pay more and get basically the same amount.”

Two months later in February, the resident began hearing loud noises coming from their walls.

“It sounded like somebody was in the room with me,” they said. “Like conversations where I could tell every single word of what was happening.”

They stood on their chair to investigate their vent for the noises, but instead found a gap between the ceiling and their wall that connected directly to the room of their next-door neighbor, who moved in that day.

The resident knocked on their neighbor’s door, a Carnegie Mellon student who was also granted anonymity for fear of retaliation, and told them about the gap in the ceiling. The two took pictures of the gap and showed them to building management, but were told by HERE “There was nothing they could do.”

The CMU student described the situation as “a complete invasion of privacy.”

“I realized that my neighbor and I could quite literally see into each other’s rooms and hear everything,” the CMU student said. “It was such a huge problem. I could hear her sniffle … I could hear her walking, and I’m sure that she could hear everything that I was doing as well.”

The two residents sent numerous maintenance requests and emails to building management. Two weeks after they noticed the hole, a maintenance worker came to assess it.

“He comes and he looks and he’s like, ‘this is a common issue,’” the Pitt student said. “I think he literally said, in his terms, ‘Everything is so shittily made,’ and I was like, ‘You’re literally the maintenance guy, what do you mean?’”

The maintenance worker didn’t repair the hole, causing the two residents to take action into their own hands by stuffing cotton balls, tin foil and cut-up sweatpants into the gap to reduce the noise. Building maintenance did not fix the gap between the rooms until July, five months after the residents reported the problem.

Regarding the conditions of rooms upon move-in, HERE’s management team said “all issues” were “immediately addressed” by their construction team. 

“It is always our goal that residents walk into pristine living conditions,” the team said.

The CMU student said the issues created by HERE added up over time, impacting their studies, their sleep schedule and their overall health.

“My family and I had so much faith in this apartment from the start,” they said. “But as time went on, it just became very obvious to us … that they either were incompetent in their roles or just did not care enough. Either way, it was just something that negatively affected me.”

The CMU student is now living at SkyVue, a five-minute walk away from HERE, and said they do not recommend students sign a lease at their old place of residence.

“They lure people in with this facade of ‘Everything is perfect, high tech, modeled really well,’ but it’s all just kind of putting a band-aid on an overall larger issue,” they said. “I hope they have fixed their issues and that the negative experience I had was only just them adjusting to managing a new building.”

The Pitt student described their experience living at HERE as “more inconvenient and annoying than anything.”

“I waited so long to move in. I was so excited to move in because they hyped it up so much … and it’s just disappointing, and I’m spending so much money for them to not take care of my problems,” they said.