I lived in a 4 bed, 2 bath apartment for my Junior and Senior year of college. There were definitely convenient things about the apartment, such as ample parking for residents, and included utilities, furniture, washer and dryer. Unfortunately, however, these apartments - and their convenience - is simply not worth their price, which continues to be raised by about $35/year per renter for the 4 bed 2 bath apartments (the other apartment set-ups are going up in price annually as well, I just do not know by how much). This price is being raised for no apparent reason; there is no large, on-going construction or improvement project. I think other students agree with me as well, since the apartment complex had trouble filling all their vacancies this year - which is a new thing for them. This spring they still had spaces available after the signing deadline, whereas in previous years there was always a long waiting list for apartments.

I have a couple of major complaints about what is offered for the price paid by students. First off, the buildings really are VERY poorly constructed. I can't even name all the things that broke in our apartment, repeatedly - and we are four calm, clean girls that took great care of our living space. We had to repeatedly call maintenance for issues such as leaking windows, clogged and broken bathroom drains, a bathtub faucet that was jammed and separating from the wall, broken toilet seats and handles, a broken kitchen faucet, broken closet doors, broken bedroom blinds that wouldn't stay up on the wall, beeping fire alarms because of a separated wire, a broken washing machine and kitchen light and the list goes on. Most of these issues were never fixed despite multiple maintenance visits, and if they were, they usually broke again soon after due to cheap materials and poor workmanship.

I felt relatively safe in the Courtyards, despite the propping of doors by residents, but we were careful to always keep our apartment door dead-bolted, because there was crime in the buildings and the surrounding Newark area. We never used the alarm system, but the panic button on the walls of the bed-rooms was somewhat reassuring. The one issue that bothered me was that the windows were SO poorly constructed that you could simply pop the bottom half of the window (that slid up) out of the frame, making it VERY easy for anyone to enter the apartment. We were on the ground floor and when we tried to close the windows, this often happened - the whole pane would come out of its tracks into your hands.

Additionally, the parking IS a problem for guests, which is really a pain for residents who want to have people over (and I had ONE party in the time I lived there). People from the apartments across the street park regularly in the one visitor lot between the 700 and 800 buildings, making visitor parking largely unavailable while there are whole rows of unused resident parking. I am very glad that the Courtyards ensures that there is ample resident parking - however, I think they should re-create the extra visitor row that used to exist, and also find a way of ensuring that there is no long term parking in the visitor lot by residents of other apartments.

The apartment grounds were nice, and well-maintained, with the exception of the SINGLE dumpster, which was often over-flowing with trash. For the price residents pay, the Courtyards really needs to get another dumpster and they should also offer recycling services, since I make a point to recycle and their lack of recycling bins makes it a huge pain to do so. I'm sure very few residents recycle for this reason. Additionally - be prepared for food and trash from drunk people in your hallways after weekends, as well as repeatedly broken doors, windows, lights, and fire alarms in the hallways.

Finally, for the most part the Courtyards staff was friendly when you went into their office; however, they are highly unorganized and VERY prone to losing rent checks. Three of my roommates were threatened with late fines when they had paid on time, simply because the staff had misplaced their check. My roommate was also threatened with a fine and given a list of violations that made NO sense whatsoever after she reported that her screen had been ripped off her window on a weekend she was not in the apartment (her room was adjacent to a emergency exit used regularly by drunk partiers). The violations included nonsensical violations like littering on community grounds, and storing personal property improperly. The staff never responded after she wrote a letter refusing to pay the fine due to the fact that she had not actually violated any of the codes they had listed by reporting a broken screen.

Overall, the Courtyards are not bad apartments - they simply are way too costly for what you get. If you're willing to get ripped off, then go for it, but if I could do it over again, I would have saved my money and not lived here. I could have had a great time with my friends at plenty of other, cheaper living accomodations around Newark.

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