Review of Urbanna Landscaping and Tara Josub

Our experience working with Urbanna Landscaping and its owner, Santa Fe landscape designer Tara Josub, was extremely disappointing and, in our opinion, deeply unprofessional.

Eco Brooklyn was hired by Urbanna Landscaping as a subcontractor to build and ship two living walls for Mary Jo McCabe and William McCabe at their indoor pool area in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at 3552 Via Brisa. We built the living walls exactly according to the design and photographs that had been shown and approved. This is a living wall system we have used successfully for roughly ten years, without prior complaints of this nature.

When the walls arrived, both the client and Tara initially described them as beautiful. Only afterward did the tone change. Suddenly, we were told the walls were supposedly not built properly, might leak, or did not look good. From our perspective, these complaints appeared to be manufactured after the fact as a pretext to avoid paying us for completed work.

The walls under construction

What makes the situation especially troubling is that the walls are, to our knowledge, still installed in the client’s home, while Eco Brooklyn remains unpaid. We also understand that the client paid Urbanna Landscaping considerably more than the amount Urbanna agreed to pay us. In other words, Urbanna benefited from our work, the client received the living walls, and we were left chasing payment.

Throughout the process, Tara Josub was disorganized, difficult to communicate with, rude, and unprofessional. In our experience, working with her was an exhausting and needlessly hostile process. We remained courteous and professional, but the treatment we received was unacceptable.

Based on this experience, we would not recommend Urbanna Landscaping or Tara Josub to other subcontractors, vendors, or clients. If you are considering working with them, we strongly suggest getting every detail in writing, requiring full payment protections up front, and proceeding with extreme caution.

Here are photos of the installed walls

Glassdoor Employee Reviews:

  • Worst experience ever!!

    Owner has a very difficult time trusting and allowing her team to build a good environment. She has a lack of understanding in how fast/slow the process of a bookkeeper to learn a companies eco system. Will hire a person and give no time to train and expects employee/contractor to know her business. When project is given with no outlines given then tells person it is wrong when completed without middle grown to teach what she is looking for.
    Advice to Management
    Connection, time, and clear expectations of positions with a policy work flow for employees/contractors is needed to build a good team. Along with learning time of positions.

  • Terrible!

    Owner is a terrible communicator, very little instruction for anyone without construction or landscape experience, short deadlines made worse by owner’s lack of time management, owner is known to pay late or not give detailed paystubs with checks, there is very little accountability with the owner and will blame others for mistakes, conversations with employees and clients can lead to uncomfortable topics and unprofessionalism, owner is known to have wild outbursts and use demeaning language, there is an absence of standard operating procedures, owner frequently deviates from the agreed-upon workflows, high turnover rate (I personally witnessed 7 employees in a short 6 month time), within the team the owner will undermine consistency and create operational friction, witnessed inappropriate comments from owner regarding race, religion, and nudity.
    Advice to Management
    Efforts to raise concerns are often met with defensiveness, limiting the potential for constructive dialogue. Aside from being met with emotional resistance, there is a tendency to avoid engaging with certain issues, possibly due to an awareness of personal accountability, which affects day to day tasks and moving the team move forward.

  • Horrible!

    Selfish, rude and unapologetic. There were several weeks throughout my time there that W2 employee payroll checks had bounced. Extremely high turnover rate for a reason.
    Advice to Management
    Find a sense of human decency, kindness, patience. Pay your employees. Less vitriol.

Tara Josub, owner of Urbanna Landscaping in Santa Fe NM

Google Review of unhappy customer:

  • We had the worst possible experience with Tara and her company !!! They TOTALLY destroyed every part of our garden. Killed plants and trees and our whole lawn. Tara did not communicate or listen to what we wanted done. She always wanted to be paid before doing any of the work we had agreed upon and then she did not do what was agreed , but kept the money. Tara did not have her own crew just extremely unexperienced men that only destroyed plants and trees.
    Stay away from this company and person .

Yelp one star review:

  • I’m posting again to say that Tara Josub did refund the $270 for the agave never planted. She also sent a $400 invoice for “additional work” that her crew did 2 months after they should have finished/completed it in the first place… that I paid for upfront as contracted. I have no intention of paying this. Tara had refunded me only after I posted a negative review on Yelp and suggested if she refund “…would I kindly remove my review”. When I came to see about that – I had never seen the other reviews on Urbanna… each one seems to have had very similar experiences, almost verbatim, and I realized that I wasn’t an isolated case. Yelp is a source (hopefully reliable) for consumers to rely on… all I said was truthful. I understand that small businesses rely on reviews to boost their business and those reviews are earned by jobs well done… I wish I could have written a glowing review, however, we still feel fortunate not to have gotten past a quote stage. All the best to Tara Josub and Urbanna, with the 24yrs experience hopefully good things will come.
  • We live in Las Campanas. We contracted Urbanna to provide a set of approved drawings for us to get landscapers to quote on. We paid Urbanna roughly $8,500 up front only to find out 3 months in to the process that Urbanna is not an approved designer/landscape architect in Las Campanas and as such Urbanna was rejected by the HOA in their attempt to have our drawings approved. In order to get our drawings approved we have had to hire another approved designer/architect to rework Urbanna’s drawings for an additional cost of $2,500. Plus an additional 2 month delay in starting work on our project.
  • Disappointed in owners communication skills. Design was good, but clearly owner was not organized or staffed to over see my project. My landscape project was larger than Urbanna was capable of handling. Project was started 3/2022 and continued services until I finally ended the relationship 9/2023. The project was never completed as agreed to in Urbanna’s contract. I’m currently starting arbitration to receive dollars held by Urbanna that are clearly not theirs. I would not refer this landscape to anyone.