As a graduate student and a newly minted college grad, we didn't expect the world when we moved in, but there were a lot of unpleasant surprises in store for us. What looked like a relatively well-kept working-class neighborhood wasn't. The fact that so few Univ. of Maryland students lived there when the school is less than a mile away should have been a warning sign, but we were from out of town and didn't know better. Crime was so bad that the yellow gates at the University Boulevard entrance would be locked at night, and there was always a PG County police cruiser sitting by the pool. I must have heard at least 20 gunshots while I lived there, and there was a lot of gang evidence. (There were Crip tags on the dumpsters, and large groups of identically clad teenagers gathered in the woods on Saturdays, usually followed by the sound of screaming.) As for the apartments themselves, they seemed relatively well-kept. Our apartment had small rooms, but was still a pretty good size for two adults. We lived on the third floor and had cathedral ceilings -- a nice surprise I definitely did not expect. But that was more than made up for by the roach problem. "Infested" doesn't even come close to describing it. They were EVERYWHERE. We had the exterminators called in twice in addition to three regularly scheduled sprayings, and nothing helped for more than a week. It got to the point where I'd wake up to find one crawling on my face, and I had to throw away part of our dinner because a roach had found its way into the toaster oven as we were cooking. We were embarrassed to have friends over. Six months after I moved into a non-roach-infested private house, I was still finding them. They took up residence in my lamp and my alarm clock. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and check the time to find roaches crawling past the LED inside the plastic casing. It turns out we were lucky. A former coworker of mine told me her grandmother was forced to move out several years before. Not only did she have a similarly bad roach pproblem, but her apartment had rats.
Other things to note:
1) The laundry rooms are poorly located (on the side of the buildings, with outside entrances), and the machines were frequently in disrepair. I worked nights, so more often than not, I'd cart everything to Waterworks (down by Value Village). Their machines work, and they often gave away detergent for free.
2) Make sure you have at least one extra parking pass. My pass got stolen, and my car was towed the same night. It cost me over $150 to get it back.

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