La Aldea is/was a brand-new apartment building this year, which certainly made it attractive as a convenient living arrangement for a new grad student moving cross-country. However, on arrival I discovered a host of problems. Some of these are simply unfair and the people to move into these apartments during the first year just got shafted: apartments were not ready on time and many of us lived in hotels for up to a week; people would walk into my apartment at random times (letting themselves in with keys they had) because they believed my apartment was one of the "unfinished" units; jackhammers at 7 a.m., etc. These problems, one hopes, will not affect people who live in La Aldea after the first year. However, here are the problems that WILL affect you:

1) La Aldea sold itself as a community for graduate students. At the end of the first semester (Fall 2003), after they experienced a mass exodus of dissatisfied tenants and a lack of incoming students, they opened registration to undergraduates. There is absolutely no way I would have signed up to live in an apartment that listed itself as "mixed undergrad-grad housing." I consider this a breach of contract. They do not.

2) This apartment is a 2-bedroom, meaning that each tenant pays $530--making the apartment's monthly rent a total of $1060. I could rent a house twice this size on my own (a house, mind you, not an apartment) in Tucson for under $500. This is a rip-off, to say the least. Particularly because I can lie in bed in my own bedroom and hear my roommate's computer keyboard clicking. Don't get me wrong--I quite like my roommate--but the fact that I can HEAR HER KEYBOARD, through a wall and a closed door, and that she can hear mine--this is utterly ridiculous.

3) There are insects. We are not dirty people. Not even slightly dirty. Yet there are insects. Everyone in the building has the same insects: silverfish, I believe--the nasty little things with multiple legs and pincers dragging behind them (apologies for not knowing the proper name). La Aldea has done nothing.

4) This is a "gated community" but the gates did not exist for the first 4 months of our living arrangement, and since then they are rarely locked, even on weekends. Tenants do not have the ability to lock the gates--only management does.

5) Fire alarms at 3 a.m. on weekends.

6) Absolutely no storage space of any kind.

7) A kitchen-layout planner who neglected to include a cabinet large enough to hold a trash can larger than the absolute smallest model.


In summary: La Aldea is a ripoff. Tucson has ample housing available and for much less money. Go somewhere else. Ambling screwed us--not just one or two people, an entire apartment building full. Petitions have circulated, etc. I am by no means the only unhappy resident of this building.

Absolutely ridiculous. Absurd breach of contract. And so on.

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