Alumni Village, the graduate student complex off Levy Road in Tallahassee, is probably the worst apartment complex I ve ever seen a university provide for grad students. The rent is cheaper than most places in town but you need to know that your utilities are provided by the city of Tallahassee and not FSU. Usually the utilities will be very high in the summer and winter months (I recall paying around 275.00 a month during those times of the year) so the money I thought that I would be saving in such a low rent area was illusory.
Recently I needed to couch surf in a friend s place in Alumni Village for a few days before I could move into my own apartment. We got a heavy downpour one night and the place just flooded. There was not much of a foundation for the building and the manner in which the water was rushing in (through the floors and through the walls) led me to believe that the distance between the floor and the ground was small, and if the ground was overly saturated with nowhere for the water to go, then it would come through the floors which it did. It didn t help that the complex was located at the bottom of a hill. My friend called the night staff person and she dragged her feet on helping him. He requested a water vacuum and she wasn t sure if there was one on site. She eventually found one but it was too small to be of any use to my friend.
He wrote the administration indicating his malaise and they told him that apartment flooding happens all the time. But before he moved in they never once mentioned that. They also said that the high risk apartments for flooding are marked, but that was also not mentioned in advance. In any case there is no discernible way to distinguish the at risk apartments from the ones that are not at risk. There is no information at all on their website http://www.housing.fsu.edu about flooding so this leads me to believe that FSU is just another slumlord trying to make money off of poor graduate students who don t have many options in a town where the real estate market is biased towards undergraduates who have rich parents. So if you are a graduate student/older undergraduate looking for apartment housing, if I were you I would avoid Alumni Village. It is a dump and FSU is its slumlord.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 03/12/2009
How. Dramatic. I guess I've gone to and taught at a different FSU, because the only rich kids I've seen are in greek houses or condos their parents bought, and they are a small percentage. I've lived at AV five years, through feederband storms of a hurricane and many other storms, and while I knew people outside of AV who got flooded, I didn't see any here. Not disputing your account, but if you can use that to decide that FSU is a slumlord, I bet you never took symbolic logic. Especially now, with admission freezes, there are *plenty* of options for 'poor graduate students' all throughout Tally - I have friends who turned up their noses at poky ol' homely AV and then suffered through crap ranging from floodings, all-night noise, rat infestations, to burglaries and shootings in more-expensive town apartments, only to move in here and be very content. It only cost them about a thousand bucks to learn the hard way. There are *advantages* to having FSU as a landlord, too. How many town landlords charge you month to month with no deposit and don't do a credit check? And don't sent you a slurry of warning notices about legal action if you're late with the rent? The utilities are just as bad outside AV, too. I have a friend in a brand-new parent-bought condo with all the latest energy-saving devices and his utilities are just as bad, if not worse, than mine.

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