What can we ask our apartment manager to plan for outages after ruling out a balcony generator?

During the last eight-hour outage, the hall lights stayed on but our apartment was dark. Afterwards my uncle sent a link to a petrol generator and said, "You have a balcony. Outside is outside."

Our balcony opens directly from the kitchen and is only three feet deep. The [CDC's generator guidance](https://www.cdc.gov/natural-disasters/psa-toolkit/use-a-generator-safely.html) says a generator must be outdoors at least twenty feet from doors, windows and vents. We can't meet that spacing on our balcony, so we won't use one there.

My partner still wants to spend about $400 on something before the next outage. We mainly want lighting, charged phones and a clear way to contact management after hours. We haven't listed everything we might want to power or checked any battery product's suitability. The manager's first response was that the building already has backup, but the hall lights and our dark kitchen suggest we mean different things by that word.

What would be reasonable to ask the manager to explain, and what should we plan for ourselves? I want to turn the worry into a usable plan rather than another purchase made because somebody says it will power everything.