I've lived here for almost six months, and I would definitely avoid living here. Ever since I moved in I have come to the conclusion that the place is crawling with cockroaches. And according to the maintenance crew, it is a problem in all of the buildings; the severity among each is to a different degree. That isn't surprising, if you ever do a walk through (and ask to see a currently open apartment, not the model) open the cabinets under the kitchen and bathroom sinks, and you will see gaping holes around the pipe work, in other words, roaches start in one apartment and march through the whole building. The apartments are old and not well kept; it wasn't very clean when I moved in. While maintenance isn't slow to respond to a problem, they don't actually fix anything, they just sort of look at it and say it's ok.

After about a month of living here I finally called for extermination, basically they spray for about 30 seconds and then you're on your own. They also pride themselves on "prefumigating, just in case anything??s wrong" but the reality is almost all of the apartments are infested and it basically reduces the population so they can show and lease the apartment without one crawling out to greet you. Once you sign then the roaches slowly repopulate until you realize you have a severe problem shortly. And I actually keep my apartment clean.

Also one of the office staff will lie to you to get you into a lease (which I'm sure isn't unique to Montecito, but you would hope for an ethical office staff) and about half of the building night lights are burned out community wide. It is after all only a quarter for a cheap off brand light bulb.

In defense of Montecito, the neighborhood isn't bad at all. It is a mostly minority area (as some have stated) but everyone here seems to be well behaved. I've never had problems, but I keep everything locked up. The location is good as well. It's also fairly quiet here, and unlike my last neighborhood, cars don't drive through very often blasting music. In that way, it is more like a community.

Still, you will have to deal with cockroaches here. And if you can live with them this place may not be a bad deal. If they disgust you then this is not the place for you. If it weren't for the roaches I definitely wouldn't have rated this community so poorly. If they'd spend a little money on keeping each apartment sealed, then at least they could isolate infestations, instead of having infestations in all of the units. This is probably why the vacancy rate is so high. I've also seen them in one of the fitness room bathrooms on more than one occasion.

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