As far as apartment complexes in the suburbs run by potentially abusive corporate landlords go, this one is the best that I have seen.

THE APARTMENTS: My tastes run to old-fashioned, so I like the late 1940's style of this complex, including the moldings, gas stove with pilot, coat closet right in front of the door, human-sized rooms, and staggered entryways which minimize shared walls and the "ticky-tacky box" feeling and maximize windows. The coat closet in front of the door is the only disadvantage of the apartment layout, as it is impossible to bring in a large couch.

The grounds have that bland surburban attractiveness: manicured grass with a very few scattered trees, some of which just died and others of which are in the process of dying. You can hear crickets and birds, and are a short walk away from a creek. We get a few crickets in the apartment per month, but they're easy to catch and bring outside.

Few walls are shared between apartments, just the kitchens, but floors and ceilings are not sound-proofed, so you can hear the TV from downstairs and the toddler galloping around upstairs until 2 am if the mother lets it stay up that long and the occasional midnight domestic altercation, but mostly it is completely quiet.

The entryways' hallways --- painted black with gold spongework --- are incongruous with the outside conservative brick. It almost feels like a vain attempt at being edgy or retro, but irony really doesn't go with this building or the suburbs in general.

THE MANAGEMENT: Some people in the office are sweet, helpful, and understanding, the opposite of the pushy-salesperson types normally in apartment management. The pushy-salesperson types do exist, and they are extremely agreeable without acting on anything they agreed to, so everyone knows whom to go to.

The management company itself is the typical evil corporate landlord. The lease contains abusive and possibly illegal clauses, such as automatic lease renewal and rent which may be raised at any time, which obviate the purpose of a lease. If you don't terminate your lease 3 months before its scheduled end, the corporation reserves the right to put you into another lease, but the corporation also reserves the right to raise rents in the middle of the leasing period on 30 days' notice. The lease allows the company to bar any person from visiting you without reason, and says that no guest may stay no more than 14 days in a lease period, which amusingly implies that the corporation prefers tenants who have one-night stands to those with serious long-term relationships. Even if the company never takes advantage of these clauses, and I'm sure they rarely do, it is disconcerting to sign such an abusive contract. The company also nickels and dimes: on top of the actual sewer and water bills, they charge an "activation fee" and "monthly service charge" for sewer and water. The sewer/water service are already there, so these fees just allow the company to pretend that its rents are slightly lower than they really are. They don't charge extra fees to parents of children, but they do charge $20 per month in "pet rent" plus a $200 fee (which they call a "non-refundable deposit").

Despite being evil, I'm sure the management company is not much worse than anywhere else, and the nice people in the office seem like a reasonable protection against the worst of the lease provisions. It seems like in practice people do the usual 1 month notice before moving out without being charged all the fees warned of in the lease. The lease said that it was mandatory to get the lease notarized, but I didn't bother making the trip and paying the $20, and no one said anything. And no one comes close enough to my apartment to find out whether I have guests or pets.

LOCATION: It's at least 1 mile to anything, but there's a lot within 2 miles, including two subway stations and half a dozen supermarkets.

PRICE/VALUE: It's far cheaper than anything I've seen, and honestly I like it better than anything I had seen, even more expensive places. The price of living somewhere inexpensive is the intangible feeling of being lower class.

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