Pros
Location: Good downtown location. If you work downtown, access many downtown businesses is fast and easy. City hall, the courthouse, banks, and a decent number of restaurants and bars are close by. Library is within walking distance. Easy access to interstates and the downtown loop. Depending on where you work, this can speed your commute time. I'm only about 3 minutes drive from I-29, I-70, I-35, US 71, I-670.

Culture: Lots of homeless people to harass you. Lots of ghetto scum roaming around hassling you. Lots of gritty, dirty, sleazy losers to ruin your street. Lots of ghetto car stereos. And on New Years, people love to shoot guns in the air.

Parking: Covered parking garage MAY be available. Parking on the street is generally accessible nearby. Easy to find a spot within one block.

Pool is available for resident use. YMCA very close by. It's super ghetto in the entire area.

Dishwasher, washer and dryer were in the unit. This is MUCH better than hauling laundry around and paying for laundry. This saved me a lot of money in the long run.

Security system for ground floor apartments.

You can paint the apartment if you want. But management advises you to choose a neutral color since they paint the walls once people move out. So if you picked Day Glo orange, they'll need to paint additional coats of paint, and this will cost you. We never painted, but you have that option, which is very nice.

As for management responsiveness, they are not. They ignore your concerns, but cash your rent checks in a timely fashion.

As for staff most are retards.

Cons:
Pet "rent" is expensive. I never understood the whole pet rent thing. As if a pet is going to be causing a problem, stealing mail, or partying at 3 am. But this is disclosed. I don't discount the place for pet rent or deposit, since they are very clear about this. I think it's around $25 per month.

Parking can be difficult to navigate. You get one assigned spot in a lot or parking ramp. Second spots are sometimes available, but cost around $50 per month. Your first spot is handled by the apartment people. The second spot payment and contracting is through the parking company, Standard Parking, which is slow to return calls, doesn't have very good customer service, and constantly gives the runaround. There are almost zero second car spots. Someone may tell you that parking spots are available, but be leery. If you don't have a second spot available and paid for at the time of your rental, don't expect to get one for months. It took me months to find a second spot. The rental people at the apartment told me, and this is a quote, "We rent those to businesses, not residents, because commuters get charged more." That didn't make me very happy.

Lots of management visits to the apartments. We have one visit at least each month from apartment people. It's hard to even comprehend how often they want to come in. "Cleaning inspections," "engineering visits," "pest inspections" etc... It's a little unnerving to constantly have your privacy invaded by people. You get 24 hours notice, and this two day window when people may or may not be coming for these random inspections. I talked with other tenants, and they said that on these "cleaning inspections" people were fined for things like excessive dirty dishes. I never had any issues, but I found it very distasteful.

Bugs. Lots of bugs in the apartment. The apartment was kept very clean, but we had bugs in our apartment all the time. And a mouse. It was not enjoyable.

Energy efficiency. Not so good. In fact, really horrendous. The windows don't shut and anyone could pry them open to break in if they wanted. Oh, people have done this already. Keeping the apartment at about 72 degrees in the KC summers cost about $140/month. There were lots of drafts even though there were two-paned windows. Our AC unit smelled of rotten eggs too. There was an insane amount of dust inside the duct work since there was no air filter installed. The freezer coils constantly froze up on the furnace due to the dust and lack of an air filter reducing the cooling efficiency quite a bit. We put an air filter on the AC since nobody came for four months to install one, and it was ruined by dripping water in 24 hours.

Noise: VERY THIN WALLS. I could deal with everything else, since no apartment is perfect, but noise from the people above us was awful. They'd pound on the floors even when the TV was at a normal volume, we could hear their conversations. When they vacuumed. When they were being intimate. Etc... Maybe some of the buildings are better, but ours was very loud.

Crime: Generally poor. Dangerous. There were a number of car breakins in the parking facilities, and evidence that homeless people were living nearby. We saw homeless people digging in our dumpsters, going through our trash, taking old clothes and eating food, taking papers from the trash. It was then that we started shredding ALL papers. We heard gunshots one night. We were accosted by drunks one night in a very creepy situation. I was told that there was a security patrol that the apartment people hired, but I only saw them once in 6 months and the guy was zipping around listening to headphones. How can you call that security'

Construction: Exterior doors are locked, but they don't close well. People propped the doors all the time making it unsafe. Kitchen cabinets were poorly constructed. The dishwasher was more like a dirt distributor. It didn't clean all that well. Carpet is thin and shows stains very easily. We had to constantly clean our carpets to keep the stains from past people at bay. It would come up from the matting.

Summary:
I lived here for a year before the new management jacked our rent from 850 to over 1100 for the exact same apartment. Our lease was up, and I was getting out of this place. I loved the actual space of my apartment, but it just was so unsafe feeling and my concerns were so roundly ignored and minimized that it was time to spend money elsewhere.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 07/26/2007
Which building and floor were you on? I just looked at a 1bdroom 4th floor adjacent to quaff, southside of building.
From: Anonymous	Date: 08/29/2007
I won't reveal my exact location, but I would say that it's not the one you're looking at. I also would add that the area seems to be overrun with people who like to get drunk and sit on the front steps of their apartments and yell threats and profanity at people walking on the sidewalk. It has gone WAY downhill recently. So if you like to be threatened walking around, look no further than the townhomes. There was a murder down the street just a few blocks away, too. This is not a joke. It was in the news. As of the date of this review, the killer is still at large.
From: Anonymous	Date: 01/15/2009
Where is everyone moving to then? I am looking to move downtown, but would like a safe place!
From: runnnnning	Date: 01/16/2009
My girlfriend and I are getting out of downtown. The crime will skyrocket when the weather gets better. (statistically) If you are dead set on Downtown, I would suggest the Library Lofts. But watch your back in the parking garages. Try to find somewhere well lit. (Hard to find downtown.) Crime can be stiffled by the simple addition of bright lighting. I'm not sure why the downtown development has not included this.

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