I lived at FC for 4 years, and it would have been a decent place if not for having to deal with the incompetent management. I should point out that by management, I mean the people in the back office who make decisions that impact the lives of the residents, not the people in the front office, who are all very friendly and helpful to the extent that they can be.

First the nice things. The grounds were nice - there are lots of trees. The maintenance people are competent and quick. The location near the metro is good.

Now the not so nice things. Although my building had no problems, some buildings have had issues with mice and insects. The walls are old and poorly insulated so that you can hear your neighbors more than you'd like. The buildings get extremely humid due to having a heat pump for heating/cooling, no externally venting fans above the stove, and no fans at all in the bathroom. So you take a shower or two and the place is at 90% humidity. This leads to mold. Everywhere. After complaining enough times, management provided me with a dehumidifier, but that thing uses a ton of electricity, and they didn't chip in for that - plus, it's deafeningly loud. Also, the parking situation is inconvenient.

That brings me to the horrible things. Management. And dealing with management's cheap policies. For instance, you pay for everything - Phone, TV, Electricity, Parking, even the Water. And the apartments aren't even individually metered for water, so they take the water use for the entire complex and divide by number of residents and have some company in Texas send you a bill for it. This means that if you use a below-average amount of water, you pay for everyone else's use. They also raised my rent by an average of about 7% per year - including this year, when the economy and housing markets had tanked and the average increase for the county was only 3%. When I asked them to justify the 7% increase when the county average was 3%, they informed me that raising my rent by 7% was not illegal. And that's pretty much management's philosophy for everything - they will screw you to the extent allowed by law. Keep these increases and the no-utilities-or-parking-or-anything-at-all scenario in mind when looking at the rent amount, because factoring them in makes FC among the most expensive apartments in Silver Spring.

So here are some other examples of things management did while I was there:
1) I requested a guest parking pass, was told it was free, and the next month got a note on my door saying that I owed $2 for the parking pass and $50 for being late with the $2.
2) They put a note on my door (discovered by my roommate upon coming home at 6PM) saying that they were re-paving an alley where people are allowed to park and all cars had to be moved by the next day at 9AM or towed at the owner's expense. So they provided 15 hours' notice when you know the re-paving had to be scheduled way in advance. I was out of town, but had luckily left my keys, so my roommate had to move my car for me or I would have been paying whatever towing fees the company wanted to charge as a result of management's incompetence.
3) I got a note on my door saying that they were checking for mice on Wednesday (this was on Thursday, so they gave me negative 12 hours' notice this time) and that I had to clean out all of my cabinets and get rid of pet food in preparation. When I called to ask them about the date, they told me that it wasn't being done in my building, even though the form clearly said that it was.
4) There are many more examples of notes on the door found upon coming home from work and demanding that similar things be done by the next morning or else fines would be levied. I came to dread coming home for fear of finding yet another note on the door, and I don't want to live in the kind of place that I dread coming home to. I suggest that you probably don't either.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 03/05/2009
Totally Agree...I would not recommend anyone to move to these apartments. Especially the ones with the new windows. I've been here for almost four years and since we got the new windows we've had mold issues all over the windows, walls near windows, bathroom behind the couch and who knows where else its been growing. The outside contractors that they hire to do the work do very poor work and doesn't appear to have any suppervision. We have to call management to inform them of the poor work that was done. Its been miserable livng here and i can't wait till my lease is up.

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