I have lived here for 2 1/2 years, and overall I do not like it. But in an effort to be objective, I will try to give both positive and negative aspects...
The positive:
Maintenence is good. I know, because I have to call them often (seems like every couple months something else breaks in our apartment). Whenever I call I don't have to wait more than 24 hours for someone to come out (if you call early, they'll be out the same day).
It is nice to live in a pet friendly community, as it seems there are not very many around here.
The neighborhood is good. It's very quiet on the street we're on. It's seems fairly safe (there were cars broken into on one occasion, but only cars that were unlocked got hit and no real damage was done. there have been no problems since). The location is pretty conveinant as well... just a short drive to West Des Moines shopping, and it's right next to I-235, making it a pretty easy drive to most other places in the metro as well.
The Negative:
Although it's nice to be in a pet friendly community, most of the pet owners there are not responsible. The is a big problem with people not picking up their dog poop, letting their dogs run around without leashes, not keeping and eye on them while they are out, letting them bark, etc.
The apartments are not very well insulated. Our heating and cooling bills seem a bit high for an apartment. It is very hard to control the temperature, it seems to vary alot. We are usually either freezing cold or burning up. I think there's actually a crack somewhere in the wall in out bedroom, as when we have heavy rain water seeps into our carpet.
The walls/floor/ceilings are pretty thin. We can hearing our neighbors upstairs walking around, their dog running and barking, their shower running, and their tv/music alot of the time. The builders also decided to attach the stairs to upper floor against the walls of the building. And we happen to be lucky enough to have on of those walls, so we get to hear people stomp up and down the stairs all day.
There is only ONE washer and dryer for each building of 20 apartments. This makes is very difficult to get laundry done when you want to.
There is also only one water heater shared by the whole building. Granted, it's a big one and haveing hot water usually isn't a problem, but there are times when usage is heavy that you may not have much or any hot water, even if you haven't used any.
In the winter the pipes freeze in the laundry room. The first year we lived there, the pipes froze up and we couldn't use the washer for about a month. In the last 2 years, they have run a hose of constant hot water into the pipe, which has kept it from freezing. However, this uses up all the hot water, and you can't take a shower all winter thats longer than about 5-10 minutes.
The people who live here are generally rude and disrespectful. They are loud and rowdy in the hallways when their drunk late at night. People flick their cigarette butts and throw their trash wherever they please. They park like a-holes. There is noise at the pool all summer long.
In conclusion, this apartment complex is not a good value for the money. If you want to live someplace nice, you need to find another place. If you want to live in a crap-hole, you can find one for much cheaper. I do not recomend it and am very much looking forward to moving out.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 05/14/2009
unfortunately no apartment community is perfext

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