My husband lived in Lakewood Lodge (called Glenbrook back then) four years ago when we first started dating. Once my lease was up, we decided to move in together and stay at Lakewood Lodge, since the rent was lower, it was in a good school district, and we needed to upgrade to a three bedroom. When the new management company took over, they made a few cosmetic improvements to the property, such as resurfacing the parking lot, and repainting the outside of the buildings and the hallways. Our maintenance man is always friendly, timely, and I never worry about him being in our apartment. That, however, is the end of the good things that I can say about this complex. They recently decided to notify everyone that tenents would now be responsible for the heat, even though there are no individual apartment meters, and nothing in our lease regarding that. The air conditioning units are ancient and only work half as well as they should. The dishwashers are no better. We used dishwasher cleaner (the kidn that dissolves lime, etc.) once a week, and still ended up with grit all over our dishes, so we have had to start washing them by hand. The dishwasher has become a giant dish drainer at this point. There is (according to maintenance) minimal insulation in the attics, which explains why top floor apartments freeze in the winter and fry in the summer. The windows and sliding glass doors leak air so badly that you might just as well not close them. Our electric bills are astronomical because of this. We have been in this same apartment for three years now, but we can't even get them to clean the carpets. I have rented steam cleaners and done it myself three or four times now. Since we had that much trouble getting carpets cleaned, I decided that I would re-paint the apartment myself, but when I went to ask them for some paint, they told me that I would have to leave them a coffee can with my name and apartment address on it, and they would get it for me. When I pointed out that it would take far more than that to re-paint the living room, dining room and hallway, they said that the paint wasn't theirs, it belonged to the painter. They refused to get even one whole gallon so that I could do the living room and entry hall. We have two children, so after a couple of years there are handprints, etc. on these areas. The paint that they use is pretty cheap, and comes off when you try to wash the walls. I bought good latex paint to use in the kids' room, so that we would be able to clean it more easily, but can't afford to buy that for an entire apartment that I don't own. The property manager is extremely rude, and seems to encourage this in the rest of the office staff also. They stopped performing credit checks, according to a staff member that I don't wish to name, and it certainly shows in the quality of tenents now living there. Recently, we had a problem with a neighbor boy, who has stolen from us and other tenents also. I told my children they were not allowed to play with this boy, who lives in a different courtyard. I told this boy to stay away from our home, since he was not welcome and had no business there. (No other children live in our building) He came over and physically assaulted a friend of our sons' while they were playing in front of our building. When my husband told him to get away from our building, and go home, this boy went to the office and told them that my husband threatened to kill him and the office manager actually came down and stood in front of our building, rolling her neck and yelling like a fishwife at my husband, who had never said any such thing. He told her that this boy had no business near our home. We have spoken to the boy's father, who made it clear that he didn't care what the boy, or his sisters, did. We told her that if she bothered to check, she would find that we had filed a complaint with the office at the time the boy stole my son's Gameboy, and that another neighbor had filed a complaint over the theft of his property by both the boy and his younger sister. She said that wasn't the problem, that my husband had no right to threaten the boy. Finally, another neighbor, who had witnessed the whole situation, came down and told her that the boy was lying, which is a normal thing for him, and that my husband had not said anything of the sort. She didn't apologize, or anything else, just gave the neighbor a dirty look, and drove away in her little golf cart. We have been trying to find a rental house in the nearby area, so that we don't have to transfer the children to a different school. We recently found one, only to be told that in order to move, we have to give 60 day written notice, pay for both those months rent (which is fine) but that we also have to pay a penalty of 20% of the total value of the lease, so there is no way we can afford to escape at this point. We're praying for the time to pass quickly until our lease is up so that we can get out of here. I wouldn't recommend that anyone move in to this complex!

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