Vernon Gardens Apartments

Pros: What they say about real estate: this place has It. Location, location location! Super convenient to everything. What the other reviewers said about that goes for my experience as well.
The building manager is super nice and attentive to resident needs, such a hard to find and wonderful kind of manager! Really looks out for the building and keeps things copacetic all around.
Cons: Maintenance issues can take longer to fix than anyone would like. The manager always makes sure the big things get resolved pronto though.

My husband and I lived here for a year in 2011/​2012, and would have gladly stayed much longer had we not needed to relocate due to a new job.
The apartments are your basic, run-​of-​the-​mill Oakland apartments. Paper thin walls and no special amenities, but really, no serious problems. They’re well-​maintained and what you’d expect for the price-​range. It’s a cat-​friendly building, which is a huge plus.
The location absolutely kills and can’t be beat. AWESOME neighborhood, and quiet and safe without being secluded. Super walkable. It’s literally right across the street from the rose garden, and right smack in between Piedmont Ave and Grand/​Lakeshore. Short 10 – 15 minute walk to either, and you have the huge Farmer’s Market that takes place on Grand Ave every Saturday morning. Easy access to all East Bay highways. I loved, loved, LOVED the location when I lived here and miss it terribly!
Other tenants are generally quiet and respectful. We didn’t have too many problems. The walls are thin, so you can’t expect it to be dead quiet. The hardwood floors also don’t muffle the sounds well like carpet. But at least people in the building don’t normally blare their music or have huge parties.
Evan the on-​site landlord is the BEST. My god, do you know how hard it is to find a decent, capable landlord in the Bay Area?! Evan is friendly, dedicated, reliable, and VERY responsive! He is truly wonderful! BY FAR the best landlord I’ve had in California.
I took off a star because the property management company that owns the building can be pretty bureaucratic. Lots of random rules. They will also take your security deposit over the most ridiculous little things (unfortunately though, this seems to be the norm in the Bay Area…“wear and tear” rules don’t apply here). Most of the apartments have hardwood floors, but if you get stuck with carpet like we did, you’re required to hire a professional carpet cleaner upon move-​out whether you need it or not. The rental agreement is seriously like 10 pages long, which should serve as a «red flag» that owners are weird. Still, this is a minor complaint considering the other places I’ve experienced in these parts…

I stumbled upon this listing while looking for something else and was immediately surprised by the low rating! As a nostalgic former resident, I have to chime in! I lived at Vernon Gardens for about a year and a half before I left California to move to New York.
Full disclosure: I previously was living in San Francisco and was one of those obnoxious I’d-never-leave-the-city kind of people. Forgive me. But I had friends who lived in Oakland and loved it, and when I encountered some safety issues in my old neighborhood in SF, I decided to save some money and move.
I very quickly grew to love living at Vernon Gardens. For less than I was paying in SF, I had a spacious corner unit with lots of natural light and a balcony overlooking the Rose Garden and more (a great view, actually). There was plenty of storage and I even had enough cabinets for all my kitchen crap, which is a miracle.
The neighborhood felt very safe (key for a single gal like myself) and I was walking distance to Safeway, Trader Joe’s, tennis courts, Lake Merritt, the restaurants etc. on Grand, and perhaps most importantly, around the block from a casual carpool pickup point which I used to get to work every morning. So this was definitely a convenient location.
I made friends with many of my neighbors, which I haven’t experienced while living anywhere else. We’d watch fireworks on the roof together and had a pretty general open door policy a lot of the time with several folks. (None of my neighbors ever scared me, as the other reviews suggest).
The property manager was always extremely kind and helpful to me. In fact, he even forwarded some of my mail after I moved! I feel like that never happens anymore. He was really looking out for me. Dealing with the actual company that owns the building wasn’t always so rosy, but I think that’s to be expected.
So this is already much longer than I expected to write, but here I am 1.5 years later, and I love living in NYC, but I still frequently think, Damn, I miss that apartment. So I think that warrants 5 stars.

My wife and I have been living at this apartment complex for a few years. I am unsurprised that there are reviews about scary people here. Welcome to Oakland… maybe you should ignore the scary and try to say ‘Hello’… I have gotten along very well with most of the tenants that I have met, and know quite a few of them by name.. The manager is very good about listening to complaints (also — If you don’t talk to the manager, don’t expect him to know what’s going on…) and is on premises most of the time. The Landlords are very good about maintenance and they have recently replaced the Elevator and redone the pool. The apartment is in a great location, right across the street from the Oakland Rose Garden, and about three blocks away from an Ace Hardware Store and a Safeway. It’s also about a ten minute drive to BART and a ten minute walk to Piedmont Avenue. Also, you get a great view from the top of the roof for most of the fireworks shows from the Oakland Coliseum and during New Year and 4^th of July Celebrations from the Jack London Square and Berkeley Marina.

There’s a psycho tenant on the first floor who blasts death metal ²⁴⁄₇ so loud, it rattles the apartment and bangs on your door 2 AM in the morning. He gets away with these transgressions since he’s friends with manager.
I’m sure there are cool tenants in other parts of the complex but watch out for this guy.

I knew Vernon Gardens was a cookie-​cutter complex with little to no personality despite a pool, fake wood floors, & granite countertops. What I didn’t know is that my neighbor would scare the living s**** out of me more than once & the walls are too thin.
I won’t go into too many details because this could become a novel, so here are a few lowlights in my one year there:
–Owner initially refused to pay for phone line repair since the AT&T bill read «DSL repair» & he didn’t get that that IS the phone line. I negotiated for him to pay half. Still. Grrr.
–Property manager & neighbor had a verbal fight that rang through the courtyard late in the night
–A very Yippy next door dog, named Precious.
In short, I say this with genuine concern for the earnest Unilocaler: don’t live here.