From:
sexyphlegm
Date posted:
10/29/2007
Years at this apartment:
2002
-
2004
4 responses
We definitely ain t in Kansas anymore, Dorothy...
University Gardens is the cheapest place to live in the area surrounding College Park--but in this case, you really get what you re paying for. (Ammendment as of April 11, 2004: They jacked up prices in the complex this year $80 more than the previous year).
THE GOOD:
- If you re a graduate student, there is no deposit.
- Everyone who lives on the second or third (top) floor gets their own balcony.
- The very top floor (the third floor) has beautiful "cathedral" ceilings. They re gorgeous, dark wood. And it makes the apartment feel less like a box.
- The apartment was basically clean when we moved in.
- Usually the maintenance staff quickly responds to calls. I never had a complaint about the maintenance staff until recently, but I ll get to that in a minute.
- When I ve had to deal with noisy (and violent) neighbors, the office staff has always been courteous and concerned. The sad thing is that I ve had to go down to the office at all.
- Uh. The landscaping is manicured. But it s kinda ugly. But at least it s taken care of'
- ADELPHI IS HOME TO THE STUPIDEST THEIVES EVER! (I ll explain why this is a good thing, don t worry.)
- The apartment comes with vertical blinds.
THE BAD:
- The beautiful cathedral ceilings are marred by the ineffective paint job. For some reason, the painters got paint on the ceiling. Not really sure why or how, because it s natural wood. It shouldn t be touched with cheap white paint.
- If you have a balcony, and live on the wrong side of the building, you can t grow flowers because the sun doesn t hit that side. But I suppose it s better than being on the sunny side of the building where you could be overlooking a Burger King and 7-11. Or, across the street, overlooking Tick Tock Liquors and the various winos.
- I recently got in a car accident and my car was in the shop for a month. Every week, I had a different rental car. I was going to return the very last rental car (since I was getting my car back later that day), and as I approached the vehicle, I noticed a lot of glass on the ground. And then I saw that the driver s side window had been bashed in. As I said above, Adelphi houses the world s dumbest criminals, as the apparently attempted to steal the generic car radio (that couldn t fetch more that $2.50 on the Black Generic Car Stereo Market). They popped a couple plastic doo-hickeys out of the dashboard but couldn t figure out how to actually pop the radio out. So you know what they stole instead' The car manual. (How stupid must they have felt' They went through all this trouble to break into my car and all they got was the manual.) So, the part about breaking into the car is bad, but the dumb criminal thing is good because it saved me money that they didn t know how to steal the stereo.
- The ugly landscaping is taken care of, however, the landscapers come in every single week--never on the same day--and it s always before 8 AM when the mowers and blowers start goin .
- Even though the apartment was clean when we moved in, the tub is so badly stained that it was hard to tell whether or not it was clean. It was only after I scoured and sterilized that I was content in the knowledge that it was clean enough to use. But even the thorough cleaning didn t make the tub white.
- Oh. And the carpet was very badly stained when we moved in, with wax and other stuff I don t recognize.
- If you live on the middle or top floors, it s really tricky to actually move furniture into. The stairwells are extremely narrow, and the landing where the doors to the apartments is only about 4X4 feet. Good luck trying to get a regular sized couch through your door. You ll have to do a Houdini impression.
- People are really lazy. Too lazy to go to the doors of buildings and knock. Instead they honk their horns at all hours of the night.
- Parking is terrible. Enough said.
- Maintenance. Ah, poor maintenance. I never had a complaint until this summer. Our air conditioner broke in the middle of a sweltering July, and even though I called and called, and even though they kept promising and promising--it took about a week and a half to fix.
- It doesn t matter what time of day it is, or what I m wearing, every time I take out the trash, I m hooted and hollered at by guys. It s very disconcerting that they ll cat call anything if it has breasts.
- People lean up against vehicles that are not their own. That s really annoying...
- There s a lot of loitering.
- Vertical blinds are tacky.
THE UGLY:
- Because University Gardens is the cheapest place to live in the area, it attracts some of the nastiest individuals in the area.
- Case in point: our downstairs neighbors were quite elusive, and then we saw an eviction notice on their door. A few days later, maintenance was cleaning that apartment out--and all of their abandoned garbage was placed on the lawn outside our apartment whilst the maintenance cleaned out the place. It was funkifiedly grotesque. Things like their couch and vaccum cleaner were so corroded that I had to wonder whether or not they lived in actual sewage.
- Speaking of sewage. The Laundry Facility in my building is absolutely atrocious. Each room is eqipped with 2 washers and 2 dryers. There is often stagnant, standing water in one of the inoperable washers. If you fear West Nile virus, then don t step foor near the doorway. The room is constantly swarming with mosquitoes, no matter what the weather. Oh. And the ceiling was actually caving in at one point, water was seeping out of the ceiling. --Huh... The gross neighbors I just mentioned lived right above this laundry room... I wonder if they did have water problems or something. Because the water had to have seeped in from somewhere.
- The water is constantly being shut off with only a morning s notice. Again... I wonder if that s somehow related to the weird gross neighbors.
- Bed bugs. My husband and I did not have bed bugs at our old apartment. But after we moved in, we suddenly had them. To the credit of the complex, they did get an exterminator out to us fairly quickly (about a week and a half of waiting--which, after reading about some peoples experiences doesn t seem so bad, but I really hated sleeping on our air mattress during that time). But anyway. We asked the exterminator how we could have contracted bed bugs. We hadn t bought any new (or used) furniture. No one had given us any new furniture. And our mattress/bedspring were *not* bought from Mattress Discounters. He was stumped. That means that the bed bugs were already in the apartment before we got here. And I tell you, bed bugs are nasty. I will forever have nightmares.
- And speaking of bugs... Roaches are in plentiful supply.
- Noise. Oh god! The noise! It s horrible! People have parties that literally last until 5 or 6 AM!
- Noise. My neighbors have sex every Sunday at 8:30 AM. How do I know this' Because the walls are paper thin.
- I mentioned earlier that nasty people seem to be attracted to the cheap living accomodations. Well, don t forget the violent ones as well. We had a new neighbor move in who liked to get drunk every night and then sit on his balcony and talk about shooting people. He also left his television on at all hours of the night--which isn t so bad, except the floorplans suck here, so his living room shared a wall with my bedroom--and thus his television was so loud it kept me up (honestly) for 72 hours at a time. I tried sleeping on the couch, and his television was so loud I could still hear it in my living room.
- My best friend drove from out of state to visit me, and the day he was leaving, I helped him pack his car. When we went out to his car, we found a pair of leopard print panties on the hood of his car. I wish I could have claimed ownership of them and passed it off as the best practical joke! But sadly, I could not. I m just not clever enough, I suppose. I cringe to think what the heck that chick was doing on the hood of a stranger s car that she forget her underwear.
- Oh. And vertical blinds suck.
Recommended: NO
Overall Rating
Parking:
Maintenance:
Construction:
Noise:
Grounds:
Safety:
Office Staff:
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User Responses
From:
WooManChu
Date:
04/04/2007
Brilliant, well-written, thorough review that paints a picture of what it must be like to live in this hell-hole. Heck, I was gonna move to the area to take a job in Adelphi, but this has convinced me to stay where I am! The further away I am from this deepest circle of the Inferno, the better.
The real question, given all these horrendous reviews, is why is this place allowed to stay open?!? Could it be that local officials are getting payoffs, or are they just too lazy-ass/bureaucratic/eye-on-retirement to give a damn about the general welfare and - gee, what a concept - doing their damn jobs?
From:
Anonymous
Date:
05/07/2007
Thanks for the review. I was seriously considering moving here, but after the review, I think not.
From:
jonel04
Date:
12/04/2007
Hello:
Could you please contact me? I lived at a Southern Managmenent apartment, The Parliaments in Annandale, VA. You are 100% correct, the apartments look wonderful...but man, oh, man. They had bedbugs. I too moved from one place to this one...NO BUG ISSUE WHAT-SO-EVER. But that changed aftere a few weeks here. They were definitely there when we moved in. Now we are in a dispute b/c I moved out (broke the lease). I would like to talk with you b/c we may be going to court. Thanks! Jonel04@hotmail.com.
From:
mishling2
Date:
12/31/2007
Jonel04 - I don't know how The Parliaments look, but University Gardens doesn't look good from the outside either. It's not run down, but I know it doesn't look as good as the worst place in Annandale, VA (believe me, I'm originally from VA). You can tell when you move to Univ. Gardens that it is old.
Disclaimer: No attempt has been made to verify or assure the accuracy of the claims made by the author of this opinion or responses. You must judge the truthfulness of any review and accept responsibility for your use of this information.
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