Avalon Hackensack at Riverside

It is 4:46 in the morning and 5 degrees outside (literally. No joke). I am sitting up in bed after a fire alarm that went off, sending my kids and I through the frigid night. Can you imagine being awakened at 3:30am by an ear-​piercing building-​wide alarm TWICE in one week? I guess the one good thing is you get so used to the (false) fire alarms going off all the time that you no longer panic. Considering that the Edgewater Avalon went up in flames, I guess we do feel glad not to have encountered any actual fire. But it’s certainly hard to go back to sleep afterwards. And I could probably get to know the firemen pretty well considering how regularly we see them.
Also, maintenence takes two weeks to respond to your basic requests. I used to live in Avalon Princeton Junction before this and maintenance used to respond the same day to requests, so I know that this is unacceptable when they advertise this as a «luxury» apartment due to it being «maintenance free living.»
The reason I gave it 3 stars and not less is because I do like there’s a swimming pool in the summer (even though the life guard ignores throngs of children pushing each other under the water, while she checks her phone). I like that my apartment is sunny and the nice kitchen with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. And I like that everything is brand new (I think the building was built in 2012). And I like the location next to the mall and route 4.

Let me just start with the fact that the leasing office team are awesome and probably the best management team I have ever met. They try to do their best to make you happy throughout your stay in this apartment. But with that being said, the apartment is by far from a nice place to live.
The entire apartment is made from the cheapest material you can find. The paint chips easily, the windows are so thin that during the winter it is freezing in the house even with the heater pumping. The walls are not soundproof, you can hear every noise from up, down, left and right. The elevator was so called «broken» for 2 months or more. This isn’t half as bad as the one thing that makes this place a living hell. The constant and I mean constant going off of the fire alarm. When I first moved in, the fire alarm went of every month if not every two weeks. The piercing noise does not stop for hours and people are just outside not knowing what to do. They say they’re going to «test» the alarms out that goes on for three hours. If you have kids or dogs, be careful because the alarm sound will affect kids or dogs. My dogs went crazy from the high pitch loud sound.
I don’t know what is wrong with the water in the shower but it comes out like soft. It will take you extra longer to shower because the water coming out of the shower head is like a sprinkle. Not to mention when it is a windy day, the hot water and heater will shut off and you will have to call maintenance to get it to work again. This has happened to me more than 5 times so far.
The leasing office is closed on Mondays which makes it so that when you have a package coming on Monday, the postal service will not be able to drop it off. The price of the apartments here are not worth the cost.
At one point, you couldn’t even walk your dogs on the grass because there was so much dog poop just lying around with no one picking up after their own dogs. If you decide to get outdoor parking, on the weekends I don’t know where all these cars come from but it’s hard to find parking outside.
I am so glad that I’ll be moving out soon because I don’t think I could live here any longer. The only part that really impressed me about this place are the people that work here. That is about it.