I have lived in the Pines since summer 2000. For the most part, the experience hasn't been terrible, but lately, I'm less certain that I'd recommend the Pines to a good friend.

The positives' Lots of space. Both bedrooms are huge (as in, I can fit my queen bed in here and still have room to squeeze in two more queen-sized beds), the living room and kitchen are good-sized, and one of the bedrooms has a walk-in closet. Our bathroom is small, but you get used to that pretty quickly, and its only a hassle if two people try to do stuff in there at the same time.

Parking is okay. I can generally find a space closest to my building, but sometimes it's so clogged with junk cars from the neighbors and their friends that I can't find a space. We don't have assigned spaces, but I sometimes wish that we did!

The neighborhood is fairly safe. It?s not in the best part of town, but I?ve never experienced crime here. The parking lot is fairly well-lighted, but they could make the areas around the buildings more well lit, and building letters could also stand to be more visible at night (to make it easier for pizza delivery!) They keep the grass and shrubs trimmed pretty well.

Yes, rent is pretty cheap. It's been $438 for more than a year now, although it would be at least $50 more expensive if I had chosen a six-month lease instead of a twelve-month lease. When I moved in, it was in the mid to high 300's, I think, so there haven't been any huge rent increases, although they have changed their policy on utilities -- gas/water/sewer used to be included in that $438, but it isn't now.

Those bills can get kind of big: we pay anywhere from $50 (winter) - $150 (summer) per month in electricity bills, and our submetered gas/waste/sewer fees can get to be around $75. And we try not to use the A/C or heat when we can rough it. Basic phone service is around $30.

So, for the negatives... the first complaint is that it's kind of far away from the central part of Norman. It's a long bus ride away from campus and a twenty-minute drive to get to I-35 in bad traffic. This sounds like a small thing, but if you're a student, that drive gets aggravating. You have to cross the train tracks to get pretty much anywhere.

Also, the cheap rent means that you're bound to have some scary neighbors. For the first year or two here, I was lucky to have polite and fairly quiet tenants living in my four-plex. But then a group of deaf people moved in downstairs. They are rude, play music extremely loud and are constantly smoking in the hallway by the front door of our building. Complaints to management don?t do much good.

Then, we got some new neighbors across the hall -- a smelly family of rednecks who smoke, play loud music, and are constantly coming and going up and down the stairs. Also, did I mention that they raise PIT BULLS' And they tend to keep the dogs in their apartment even though large pets are forbidden'! It's terrifying.

Well, I complained to management yet again, and still, I confront those scary slobbery creatures (owner and dogs) outside my door sometimes. A friend of mine recently moved out of her apartment here because she couldn't stand her neighbors, either.

Rent is cheap, but so is the construction of the apartments. There's this one step on the stairs leading to our apartment that is extremely tall compared to the other steps, and last September I fell because of the step and severely sprained my ankle. They still haven't fixed that problem.

The apartments weren?t designed very well. The bedrooms are large, but they should have used some of that space for better storage (like maybe a hall storage area with shelves and/or drawers) and a larger bathroom with built-in storage. I believe these apartments were originally designed for low-income housing, which would explain the lack of craftsmanship and forethought.

The windows are flimsy and shake in the wind, and it seems like the apartment gets extraordinarily cold or hot during extreme weather conditions. During the hottest heat of summer, I can't get the temperature of our apartment to go below 82 or so. Probably because of the poor insulation and our ancient, beat-up air-conditioning unit they refuse to replace.

(Update: During the summer of 2003, our A/C broke every other day. No exaggeration. Then, it took several days for the maintenance men to get there to fix it. We suffered through 100-degree heat the entire summer, practically. I was paging the emergency maintenance pager so much that I actually got a call from the wife/girlfriend of the maintenance man, accusing me of being the woman he was sleeping with on the side.)

Our fixtures and appliances are cheap, too, like the tiny Hotpoint fridge, inefficient dishwasher and scrawny metal kitchen sink with the sprayer that never works, but it could be much worse. For the most part, the appliances are fairly modern (maybe 10-20 years old) and work decently well. One annoying problem is the lack of a full-size water heater. We have one of those short half-size ones in the kitchen, and there is never, ever enough hot water to take a fifteen-minute shower. (Women, you can forget about shaving in the shower unless you don't do anything but shaving.)

The cheapness is physically apparent in other cosmetic problems - like the fact that they just slap on some white paint for new tenants instead of cleaning or stripping the walls/cabinets. Which means that the walls and many other surfaces feature a thick layer of globby white paint. The caulking in the bathroom is also globby, peeling and impossible to get clean. The linoleum tiles in the bathroom and kitchen are cheap and improperly installed, so they're always peeling, sliding and buckling.

Also, as I've mentioned, the management is not as effective as it could be. When I first moved in, they were pretty responsive to our needs. During the summer, my air conditioning was fixed within 24 hours, and they'd send help for a clogged toilet within an hour. They installed ceiling fans in the bedrooms, and installed a new fan in the kitchen when the old one exploded (yes, it really did explode!)

Lately, though, I think management has changed hands, and service has gotten horribly ineffective and slow. One time, our (always-malfunctioning) toilet overflowed, spilling water an inch deep onto the floor. We turned off the water and dammed the flow with a pile of towels, but there wasn't much else we could do. Because this was such an emergency, and because it's our only toilet, we paged our "24-hour maintenance" at midnight. They didn't call us until ten the next morning! Not cool when there is sewage in your bathroom, I tell you what.

I've complained (politely) about a number of minor problems, and they still haven't come in to fix them. For example, one of the bedroom windows was broken in a windstorm last fall (six months ago). The toilet flushes on its own, as if possessed. One of supports for the cabinet door under the kitchen sink has completely fallen off, which means the door just hangs limply.

In other words, The Pines can be a decent place to live, if you can deal with the inconveniences and annoying neighbors. But if you decide you can't deal with that, and want to break the lease, you'll have to pay something like four months' rent! In that light, I'm hesitant to recommend them to anybody I really care about. Rent at your own risk... but only if you can't afford anything better!

Update, Aug. 2004: DON'T move into the Pines. It-and the surrounding neighborhood-has gone downhill even more since I moved last year. Upkeep of the grounds is terrible. I barely swam in the pool at all last summer because it was disgusting.

And when I moved last year, I didn't get any of my deposit back, even though I was a clean tenant. I'm guessing the minor water stains on the floor from their defective plumbing, and the broken window they should have fixed a long time before we moved, might've had something to do with it (or so they would claim.)

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