I lived in the same apartment in Colonial Village for 7 years. That's not an endorsement of the place--the emotional and financial cost of moving was just too great while I was in grad school. In fact, I was never so happy as the day I finally moved out of there. Here's my assessment:

The management is hit-or-miss. I've witnessed managers treating various tenants quite rudely, even bringing one young woman to tears. Often I would drop in the office and be completely ignored for several minutes.

Worse than their lackluster manners, however, was their general inattention to complaints. I'm NOT a complainer, so when I was driven to call with an issue, it was usually serious. For example, the exterior and common-area (hallway) lights in my apartment building were failing to come on at night for several months. The hallway, stairway, front walk, and parking area were all pitch dark at night--I had to carry a flashlight to find my own door. For a long time Kamins did nothing despite repeated calls, even after I fell in the darkness and injured my ankle.

Furthermore, the washer and dryer units were frequently nonfucntional or damaged, and Kamins would be very slow to fix them. I stopped using them because they were so unreliable. They frequently ate or damaged my $1 plastic tokens because the token-taking mechanism was decrepit.

As other tenants have mentioned here, the fire alarm in the exterior hall would occasionally go off for no reason, or would chirp intermittently (because it needed a new battery). Kamins was slow to change the battery or to respond to the false-alarm problem.

The children of some other tenants were in the habit of building wooden ramps for skateboard and bicycle tricks and leaving these ramps and other debris in the middle of the parking lot at night, or on walkways. THis presented a very dangerous situation, especially considering that the exterior lighting is extremely poor, even when it works (and as I mentioned, for a long time it didn't work at all). My complaints to Kamins about this situation went unheeded, and in fact, the fall that hurt my ankle was caused when I tripped over this debris left on my walkway.

I chose to rent this apartment because at the time I moved in, it was a good value. Kamins consistently raised the rent each year, and now for a similar price nicer units can be found in neighboring towns.

THe apartment itself is oddly configued. The living room and bedroom are large, but the kitchen is microscopic and has virtually no counter space. The small bathroom is located adjacent to the living room, and none of the interior doors shut properly--so the bathroom is not very private. The interior doors do not recess into the door frames when closed. They shut by merely covering the doorframe on one side (hard to explain). It looks very weird, as the closed doors seem to be simply propped up against the walls.

The worst problem I had was terrible ventilation. Perhaps this is the reason for odor problems mentioned by other tenants here. The bathroom had no ventilation other than a rickety window (located *in* the shower)--so using the shower would make the entire apartment damp. The dampness would foster mildew and musty smells, and no amount of cleaning could keep up with it. I was forced to purchase an electric dehumidifier to run year-round.

The under-sink cabinets were deteriorated from years of accumulated water damage--rotted wood, etc. The antique ceramic floor tiles were susceptible to breakage from normal floor traffic. THe walls had obviously been repainted many, many times, and the layers of paint plugged door latches and some electrical outlets.

The number of electical outlets was woefully inadequate. The large living room had four, and one of them was operated by a wall switch. I needed several outlet strips in order to plug in a typical assortment of elecrical appliances and electronic devices. The electrical system was capable of handling the load, but I had to leave the switched outlet constantly on because it necessarily powered several devices.

Climate control was a serious problem. The electrical heating system was surprisingly inexpensive to use (adding only about $20-30 to my monthly electric bill), but it also was often inadequate to fight the bitter cold nights in midwinter. Kamins prohibits air conditioners, and the tempterature in my apartment would routinely swell well into the 90s in mid summer. Add to that the poor ventilation and the dampness from the bathroom, and the apartment was unbearable most of the summer.

I had some chronic problems with ants and earwigs (probably due to the dampness), but on the bright side, I never saw a single cockroach.

Noise was sometimes a problem. My upstairs neighbors had wooden floors that creaked loudly when they walked. The stairs to the upper apartments ran past my living room, and they were also very loud and creaky (the tendency of upstairs tenants to run on the stairs and to bang on my adjoining wall as they did so didn't help). Maintenance did tend to perform lawn maintenance early in the morning, running lawn mowers and weed-whackers right outside my bedroom window.

Snow removal efforts were terrible. This is partly because many tenants were unable or unwilling to move their cars for proper plowing of the parking lot. Unfortunately, that doesn't explain why walkways were also poorly shoveled, or why tenants had to climb over large snow embankments to get from the walkway to the parking lot. The parking lot and driveway areas would develop large and dangerous potholes that would go unfilled for months and months (some were still there when I moved out in August, which had been there since the previous fall). The parking lot would often be full at night, partly because several spots were unusable due to snow accumulation, and partly because I never saw anyone enforce parking restrictions. (Supposedly tenants could only keep one car on the property and they required a parking sticker to do so. I parked there for seven years and never had a sticker, and no one complained.)

Often the dumpsters would fill to overflowing, usually during the predictable times when a large number of tenants would be moving out.

The window shades they provided would quickly wear out and fail to work, and they tore easily. I stopped using them and replaced them with draperies. THe refrigerator was old and run-down when I arrived, with broken door shelves held together with shipping tape. It leaked cold air and water, and the freezer would fill with frost in about a month's time. To their credit, when I could no longer stand the decrepit fridge and complained, Kamins did replace it quickly with a larger, brand-new unit. (Actually, that action was taken by a member of the maintenance staff, not by a member of management. Generally, the maintenance people were more helpful and polite than the management.)

I could go on, but the basic point is this: THe apartment was cheap (at least when I moved in), and it comes with snow and trash removal, on-site laundry facility, on-site parking, and a convenient bus stop in the middle of the complex. The unit I lived in was very old and had been through years of changing tenants, and it simply showed its age. Kamins could have been more responsive to problems, and they could have taken more initiative to renovate or improve the property (perhaps this was the owner's fault and not the management's, I don't know). When I left, they were in fact refacing the exteriors of some of the nearby units, and they had fixed and repaved the worn-down roadway while I was living there (it was prone to flooding before it was fixed). If you want a pleasant environment with lots of amenities and friendly, responsive managment, don't live in Colonial Village. If you need to live in Amherst proper, you have a tight budget, you need easy access to the bus, and you don't mind living in sub-ideal conditions for a year or two, it may be worth considering. Personally, if I had to move back, I would look to neighboring Belchertown or Sunderland for better rental units at a similar rate.

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