First off: yes, this is an expensive complex. The apartments are nice, well-maintained (with a caveat or two), and full of amenities, from the washer/dryer unit to being pre-wired with CAT 5. The one let-down in apartment design' No A/C... and no ceiling fans. You can get by without A/C in Foster City, but at close to $3000 a month for a two-bedroom place, put in frikkin' fans, folks.

A lot of reviews of this place seem horrified by how easy it is to tell you have neighbors, but I'm not sure how that could realistically be avoided other than by, well, not having neighbors. I don't think this is a serious problem, but understand that this is not country serenity. Many residents seem to be young professionals, and many of them have small children.

The noise *is* a problem, both from the airport and from Highway 92 literally being a block away. Yes, this sounds obvious, but you may not realize how noisy this place is on a walk-thru. What makes this a serious problem is that without the A/C (and without the fans!), you're going to *have* to leave the windows open on all but the coldest days. Light pollution can also be a problem if you're facing the parking lot.

Oh, yes. Parking. Yes, you have a parking garage, but if you have a two-bedroom place, be aware that you may have a "tandem" parking space: one space long enough for two cars, but if both are parked there, one car is blocking the other. This means in practice one car ends up in the parking lot. The parking lot is small.

Last, the caveat about maintenance. The water pressure in my apartment is anemic, the hot water takes forever to heat, and management and maintenance have repeatedly insisted that this is Just The Way It Is here. Look, the idea that a 10-year-old apartment complex in Foster City doesn't have plumbing that can compete with the 60-year-old place in San Jose I moved out of is not credible. Combine this with the passive-aggressive maintenance guy who's twice left notes telling us how we could fix problems ourselves if we went to Home Depot, and it gets kind of teeth-grinding.

Now: having said all this, keep in mind the apartments *are* nice, and the location is pretty remarkable: a block from the Bay, walking distance of several fast food places and a grocery (and Leo Ryan Park), a couple minutes' drive from Bridgepoint Shopping Center and just a little farther to downtown San Mateo. Foster City has a suburban feel *and* it's in the heart of the Peninsula, and that's a lot of what you're paying for. It'd be great if you could live in these apartments, *with* A/C (and thus the ability to shut windows and keep out the noise) and maybe, y'know, adequate water pressure, for $1500 a month instead of $2700. But given actual rental market prices for the area, you could do a lot worse.

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