My husband and I lived at the Meadows from August 2004-September 2005. The first several months were a total nightmare. They assigned us the wrong parking spot so we had no parking when we moved in, and then had to deal with an insane upstairs neighbor. She would watch violent television (gunshots, screams) in her bedroom (all the apartments are stacked, so her bedroom was directly over ours) ALL NIGHT at high volume. We were calling security constantly, and she would just scream at them when they showed up. Management wouldn't do anything about it except offer to make US move AND we would have to pay for it. Finally OUR CEILING FELL IN -- one morning we went into the bathroom and the entire ceiling had collapsed into the bathtub and into the top of the walk-in closet next door. There was water damage everywhere. The office "graciously" allowed us to move to the apartment across the hall with no breaking-lease fee. HOWEVER, what they didn't tell us was that they were forcing an EXTENSION on the lease to do this -- we did not find out about this until many months later when we were trying to leave the complex. We had to move everything we owned that night. In the end maintenance claimed to not know why the ceiling fell in, because none of the pipes were broken -- so apparently it was a mystery. The maintenance staff are very nice people, and always very helpful and on time -- but the actual office management is godawful. And they changed staff entirely THREE TIMES in the one year we were there -- and changed security companies more often than that. There were constantly series of breakins going on in the complex, with posters up -- usually the breakins were from the teenage kids of other residents (probably like our insane upstairs neighbor). Because we were on the bottom level (if you do move in here, move UPSTAIRS, you will save yourself a lot of trouble), there were insects coming in from the outside CONSTANTLY because there are tiny holes in the walls (the apartments were built in the 1960s). We had the most monstrous insects you can imagine coming in -- bugs that I didn't even know existed in southern California. I actually like bugs, but not crawling around in my carpet and in my kitchen! And FLEAS. We have cats, and our cats take flea medication (Advantage), they never had a single flea on them when we came to the Meadows -- but they got infested with them within a month of our move-in. Even the flea medication wouldn't keep them at bay, even though we had lived in the area before (2 years previous in SoCal, and I'm a native San Diegan) and had never had a problem.

It is very likely that we will live in the Los Angeles area again. Culver City itself is not bad, but I would never go back to the Meadows in a million years. There are plenty of other smaller places to live. The Meadows is too big for its own good -- it's a massive corporate system, and so you never have the same manager and nothing gets done. In the building we were in, as an additional note, something was always breaking in the wall with the pipes near the building entrance. Maintenance would come about every two weeks to fix the plaster and paint, but never fixed the actual problem. This is symptomatic of everything the Meadows does -- if you have a problem you are stuck with it until you can get out of your lease. And when we finally did leave, they tried to con us out of our security deposit, claiming "carpet damage". But when we told them we had taken photographs and there certainly was no carpet damage, and that our estimate that we had on our move-out inspection mentioned no damage, they quickly backpedaled and said they would refund the whole deposit. CROOKS.

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