Because of a temporary duty assignment, I had to resort to an apartment (otherwise, I would have bought a house outright). After seeing some of the nightmare places out there in Fairbanks (believe me, you'll see some shantytowns out there that would scare you at a first glance), I basically settled for Sophie. So, my "YES" recommendation comes only due to the fact that it's relatively-speaking the better places to rent in Fairbanks.

Location is decent-enough: near the crossing of Airport and University. It's within walking distance to two grocery stores: Safeway and Fred Meyer. That aspect is nice, but given the weather up here, you won't be walking to too many places during the majority of the year. The Safeway has been recently renovated, and they also have a new strip mall near by with a Blockbuster and a pizza joint.

Neighbors usually keep to themselves. I don't know about the other buildings, but my neighbors are mostly military, and the noise levels can go up a bit during the weekends.

One thing I like about the design of the buildings is that the buildings surround a large grassy courtyard. This means that the windows of other buildings with direct line of sight into your apartment is pretty far away, and the only way you can make anything out on the other side is by a binocular. So, when I look out my balcony there's more of a sense of privacy compared to some other places I've lived in in the past.

They have strict rules about opening windows during 1 Oct-1 May... but that's understandable because of the weather. If you accidentally keep your window open during the harsh winters (-40-50 degrees F), you can potentially freeze your entire apartment and the pipes within the building, and that will cost you big time. I've actually seen a house so thoroughly frozen because the renters forgot to close the window, so I think that this is a good policy.

Kitchen: no dishwashers! This part bothered me a bit, but I got over it.

Interesting old school wall paper... but you learn to ignore that.

Laundry room: I had the biggest problems with this. Half of the dryers were broken all the time, so you had to keep account of which ones failed you in the past. They run on special tokens, so you gotta go buy the tokens from the management office. They've recently added a keypad lock system into the laundry room (see below for Security).

Security: definite NOT a gated community or controlled access place. Pretty much the front doors to the buildings are unlocked, so anyone can walk in the building. I had at least a couple of instances where I encountered homeless persons, one man who's actually fairly well-known by the Fairbanks police who managed to get in and probably slept in the laundry room (now they've put a keypad lock on the laundry room door, although I feel like the money would have been better spent putting such locks on the entrances), whom I ran into in the laundry room one Saturday morning as I walked in with my laundry.

Parking: all outdoors. They supposedly have garage parking available for extra money, but I haven't heard anything from them in a year after being on their wait list for them. One assigned parking space per apartment, with electric plugs for cars (you'll know what I mean when you get here), and unassigned parking spaces in front of the building without plugs (some people run extremely long extension cords from their assigned spaces to these parking spaces for their second cars).

Overall, if you're here in Fairbanks temporarily, and an apartment is the way you're going, you can't technically go horribly wrong here. It's just that if you're used to living in your own house or better apartments with better amenities, you'll be a bit disappointed. But, if you did some hunting out here, you'll know that compared to the other nightmares out there, this place is far superior.

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