BEWARE of renting from this apartment community!!! I am an architect, with over a decade of experience working and designing in the construction industry, and I still marvel every day at each new discovery of how CHEAPLY these apartments were built and how poorly they are maintained. They re way overpriced, above average market rent, yet the quality they provide is basically one step above a slum! The problems with this place are so numerous, I ll have to outline them each, one-by-one:

1) The worst part from my experience at least, is either the shoddy treatment we ve received from the leasing office staff and/or the incessant flow of ants in our apartment. But they both go hand in hand. To concur with at least one other review here, the main culprit is the leasing office manager. But really, it s not even her, it s her boss with the Equity Residental headquarters that is calling the shots. The fact is that the pest control guy they hire from Orkin merely treats the apartment, not the building and the problem then actually gets worse! We live in a ground floor apartment and we ve had black swarms and trails all along every nook and cranny of our apartment at some point in time. Management has used the lame excuse of all apartments get ants, especially when the weather changes or you need to keep the apartment clean enough and other crap like that, which is all bogus. We even had to beg and threaten to get management to authorize maintenance to tear up part of our carpet when one part of the apartment was infested, only to find exactly what I anticipated: huge cracks in the concrete foundation. They sealed these cracks, but of course, the shoddy construction leaves so many other openings, the ants eventually just find another way in. It s likely there are colonies nested underneath the building, yet they never authorize the pest control service to actually treat the outside of the buildings, and inside any of the other apartments around us. To the embarrassment of the leasing office manager during one treatment period, the pest control guy started blabbing to my wife about how he just found a dead possum inside one of the other building attics, and how there s always critters roaming into these buildings. Yeah, be prepared to kill pests and animals yourself if you want to live here in peace.

2) As many of the other reviews have noted, there was a garage fire in 2006 that was documented as faulty wiring (shoddy construction) and even though this happened before my wife and I moved in, it doesn t surprise me in the least. The garages are also a safety hazard, with no exit/entry man door to get out in case the flip-up car door closes on you and gets stuck, which can happen. I ve had the door fall on me once when we had to open the door manually during a power outage. CHEAP!!!! Wish I would have known about the construction quality before ever moving in, it may have changed our minds.

3) The rash of garage break-ins other reviews have also listed were happening right around the time we moved in. Management downplayed this trend, though they did finally put out a notice later to be careful. Oooh aahhhh. Unfortunately, foolish me, about 8-9 months after this notice, probably while the thieves laid low in our area, I left a set of golf clubs in my garage. While away on a 2-week vacation, what happened' Yep, our garage was broken into and my clubs long gone. Only the clubs, none of the other stuff we had which isn t worth much to a thief to re-sell. And still, to this day, a year later, the garage locking mechanisms are still the same cheap ones that have always been there. It s free pickins!

4) As other reviews have noted in detail, the parking continues to be problematic. They will only give one parking spot per apartment, if you have at least two adults on the lease, and expect the other car to be parked in the garage. Fair enough, but the problem is, they don t enforce the parking restrictions! All these people who clearly were foreclosed on because of their stupidity in buying a house they could never afford, are now moving in and filling their garages to the top with their excess junk. And when coming home late at night, especially on a weekday, there isn t a spot to be found. But there sure are quite a few cars and mini-mobile storage units (all without the permits) parking in the spaces. And when we called management to request they step up the enforcement, they had the audacity to tell us it s our responsibility as tenants to call the towing company if we see cars parked illegally. Huh'!'!' What are we paying rent for''' CHEAP!

5) Be prepared to walk quite a distance from anywhere you park, if you can find a spot, to your apartment. The whole complex is a very poorly designed layout, and is quite annoying when unloading large amounts of items like groceries from your car and having to make 3-4 trips back and forth that takes about 20 minutes. And since there is precious little open common space, you re always running into kids playing games in the parking lot area. I m always afraid one of these days, I m going to back up and run over a dumb kid who is hiding behind my tire.

6) The maintenance guys themselves are actually very nice and friendly, and do their best to help how they can. It s too bad they work for the cheap management though, and are forced to re-use old items from other apartments when maintenance requests are made. They tried to re-use a malfunctioning ballast in our bathroom fluorescent fixture, and when we complained in writing, they finally put a new one in then took our old malfunctioning one to put in another apartment. We had a plastic oven vent cover break, and the maintenance guy was ordered to repaint an old one white to match and install it in our apartment. It smelled like paint in the place for a couple hours, and now we have a new vent cover, white but smudged with fingerprints and paint drippings all over it. CHEAP!

7) The ovens are terrible, and don t cook at the temperatures they say, and tend to over or undercook whatever you re trying to make. And the oven in our apartment was new when we moved in! CHEAP!

8) The refrigerators don t cool equally and tend to freeze everything in the back, even when the temperature is turned up as high as possible. CHEAP!

9) There is very little closet space in the bedrooms or anywhere in the apartment. And the kitchen pantry is designed too narrow and too deep for easy use. And the rest of the cabinet space' Forget it! We ve had leaking sink problems at least twice in 18 months of living there. CHEAP!

10) The vertical blinds they install on the windows for privacy are always falling apart when you open and close them as normal use requires. And beyond that, even when closed, people walking by can still partially see into your apartment! We had to buy our own curtains to install over the openings just to have a semblance of visual privacy. CHEAP!

11) You can hear neighbors above and beside you all the time, but that s probably to be expected at any apartment complex. Although you don t expect to hear slamming above you 20-30 times in about an hour period, as one of our neighbors did. It was so bad, we had to call the police, just to make sure someone wasn t being abused in the apartment above!!!

12) Although this really isn t Siena Terrace s fault, since the entire neighborhood including single-family houses had the problem, there have been numerous power outages within the past year there. We had two in less than a week over the summer, and the weather was just fine, there was no natural disaster or anything to provoke them. One was over 10 hours long overnight, so of course, all the fresh food in the fridge spoiled easily in that time. It s an SCE problem on the local power grid, but still CHEAP!

That s probably enough reasons above to say, when our lease expires this year, we re moving the hell out. And they ll probably try to raise our rent again this time anyway, as they did last year. But don t even think about trying a month-to-month or any other lease period of less than 1 year, because your monthly rent will shoot even higher through the roof!!! And thanks to all our experiences and smarts having documented all our complaints in writing, we expect a fight when we try to get our deposit back. Hopefully not, but if you re considering moving into Siena Terrace BEWARE!

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 04/27/2009
If you find a better complex, please post a reply with the details. We're fed up with the ant problem also.

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