The room I was going to rent seemed okay at first, as I was renting it from someone I knew who lived there before me. It was a decent sized apartment. My friend was also giving me most of his furniture if I took the place. Most utilities were included.

It seemed like a good deal. Read all the way to the bottom to find out why it wasn't.

Pros: Decent price for a spacious apartment. Close to schools and grocery store. Noise control is good from room to room, but not from hallway to room.

Cons:
Shortly after moving in I realized that we had made a mistake! The 'included' utilities barely seemed to work. The heat only kicked on when it got extremely cold, and the radiators were pretty much on or off, with little temperature control. The water would randomly shut off with no warnings and not come back on for several hours. Electricity there is practically non-existant. Power surges constantly restart my PC during the day so I can never use it, and there was never enough energy to run a single 8000 BTU Air conditioner...so the apartment was insanely hot. They finally sent someone, who just told me that lots of people are running appliances and there is nothing they can do.

Some days, we would be without electicity for 5 hours or more, and it would take their 'emergency maintainence' over 3 hours to send someone to fix it.

I thought that the electicity issue would be resolved during the winter, when less people run their ACs, but it is not. Power is often out in the hallways so it is very difficult to see. In the lease they claim "no responsibility for spoiled food as result of refrigerator malfunction", so they have no real urgency to restore electricity to the building.

Twice, the fire alarm went off as because someone pulled it (when there was no real fire, thankfully), and it took their emergency maintainence over an hour to come turn it off, during which time all the residents had to stand outside in below freezing temperature at 3 AM.

FedEX and UPS cannot deliver packages because the buzzer system DOES NOT work and these people do not have keys and cannot give you your packages.

For over two years (the year my friend lived there and the first year I lived there), the front door lock was broken, and homeless people would sleep/hang out in the staircase. This was finally fixed.

They also never notified us when they were doing painting on the outside, so one morning I woke up to find a man outside my window (NOT on the first floor) staring into the bedroom early in the morning. Of course, I called and complained about this.

The doorknob on our door is broken and it used to take about a minute to open the door just to get into my own apartment. I called and asked to have it repaied several times, which it was not. In the end, we just taped the latch shut.

There are only 2 washers and 2 dryers, which break down on a regular basis. Waiting for them to repair them takes over a week.

The elevator (the main reason I took the apartment) almost never works. It breaks down daily, and it takes several days for the repair people to come and fix after the call is placed. It will work for a few hours, only to break again the same day. The gate is extremely difficult to open and shut and the elevator walls and gate are covered in grease which is difficult to get off clothes. Calls to get the elevator fixed are placed on a daily basis by several tenants, but it is still broken. To my knowledge, no one has been stuck inside...yet.

Window panes are not securely fastened into the windows, and heat and cold air easily comes in and out. I need to block all window cracks with towels (since using tape in the apartment is not allowed in the lease), because in the lease they claim they are not responsible for the windows.

They also tell you that must decide on whether you want to stay in that apartment/ building in February, and only give you about 1 week to make your decision. (They asked my friend in March and gave him 2 weeks, so I was not expecting to make a decision so soon). The lease being up in May, I was completely caught off gaurd by this, and felt I had to stay because I didn't want the pressure of being forced to look for a new place in only a few weeks.

And, of course, the worst was I, and the other tenants on our floor, noticed an extremely foul odor that got worse with each passing day. (The smell was also worse on some days than on others) I began to place calls to get them to come out and find out what was wrong. My initial calls were not answered, so I began calling their company office and the emergency maintainence line several times each week to get someone to come out. The smell was so stifiling that I had to put up several curtain in walkway from the door to the living room to keep the smell out. My calls finally were answered when I became extremely angry on the telephone about the lack of service they were providing. When they finally came, they first asked to look in my apartment to see if it was coming from inside there. Afterwards I went out into the hallway with them to inspect the other rooms. When they opened one room, we discovered a human corpse, slouched over in a chair, with it's head resting on the radiator (this is why some days it smelled worse than others. The REALLY bad days were when the heat came on and his brains were being fried). Thankfully, they removed the body the same day, but as a result the smell got extremely bad, and did not subside for a few months.

A few weeks ago we realized that new tenants had moved into that apartment, probably unaware that there was a dead body in the same location there bed is now.

So unless you want the same experience that myself, and other tenants in our University City Housing Company owned apartment complex experienced, then please stay away! (I normally don't complain publicly about these things, but the customer service they have provided is absolutely terrible, and all prospective tenants have a right to know before getting mixed up with this company!)

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