Archstone Boston Common

They were increasing the rent. If we wanted to stay even an extra month at a time I think it was going to be like $4,400 and an extra year would've been $4,200. It's about a third very rich international college students that live there who smoked a lot of pot and play a lot of loud music in the middle of the week despite multiple contacts with management and promises to fix the problem. My fiance's apartment basically smelt like marijuana smoke at least once a week and often times during the week. It actually smelled like someone was in his closet smoking. They tried a couple of things like changing out the air filters and installed extra tape under the doors, but it never fixed the problem. We've had two other coworkers move there who had the same experience. It's kind of like a very expensive college dorm. It's very nice and I admit it looks great when you walk through. There's a swimming pool which was fabulous and there's a nice weight room and everything, but if you're a professional and are spending that type of money you would like the right to not have loud music at 3:00 in the morning on a Tuesday or marijuana smoke. The smoke would be so heavy at times that it would wake us up in the middle of the night. We bought an air purifier and a humidifier. We would open all the windows and run the air purifier. After that we would run the humidifier to put some moisture back in the air because it would dry everything out and then shut the windows. It was terrible and when he ultimately didn't sign the lease they asked if there was anything they could do like move him to a different unit on a different floor. He talked to them like eight times and they never offered to move him before, so he said he wasn't interested. He was on the sixteenth floor, but we have a friend who's having the same issues on the third floor and another friend who's having the same issues on the eleventh floor. It's a beautiful building, but the people who are in there make it difficult to appreciate it. The staff was great. The people who work there everyday like the concierge and the doorman are wonderful, but the actual management that could influence those types of things are just not very responsive. I did enjoy the swimming pool, but it was a real pain for my fiance. It's a great location, but it's just an unacceptable amount of marijuana. The layout was good, the kitchen features were good, and the staff who is there on a day-to-day basis were good. The price was kind of average for that type of luxury building in Boston. It was what we would expect, but they hike the price up pretty high every year. If you're like 22 years old and have that type of money the place would be great. We would call the concierge and somebody would come up to verify it was smoke. They would do that within an hour or usually within 15 minutes, but it was just that nobody would do anything about it. There's a strong no tolerance policy and it didn't stop or affect anything even a little bit. It's a non-smoking building and they are supposed to kick people out after three times. Multiple neighbors had more than three write-ups and nothing changed at all. We looked at other Archstone's but decided to go to a private real estate agent.