My husband and I lived here for 3 years. Between us, we had also lived in 3 other apartments in Austin prior to Abbey Road, and this was definitely the best place we've lived in the city.

Downsides:
- The place was built starting in the '60s and is always falling apart in sections, staggered by their relative ages. Our tub is peeling and our refrigerator handle broke off, and they told us they'll wait until we move out to replace those. Our toilet stops up every time any reasonable amount of solid is put in it (think about it). Our downstairs neighbor woke me up in the middle of the night during a storm to tell me our balcony had a hole in it pouring rain into their bedroom below. The worst of it was when we had our decades-old mud-filled air conditioner replaced, in slow, drawn-out stages, and it didn't even make much of a dent in our electric bill.
- The apartments are poorly designed for air circulation, and if you lived on the 3rd floor, you're screwed. Air-conditioning costs a fortune--we spent $150/month on electric in the summer when we kept our thermostat at *80* degrees!
- Management changes often, and you never know what you're going to get (for instance, when we came to look at the place, we were quoted one price, and when we came back the next week to sign a lease, there was a new person in the office who gave us a completely different price).
- Floorplan (at least for 1-bedrooms) is just a box divided in fourths (with a super-long skinny living room and tiny kitchen with only two drawers), no ceiling fans, very few lighting fixtures, and 1-2 windows total.
- They claim to recycle ONLY aluminum and paper, but the bins in no way accommodate the number of people in the complex, and I don't know if it really gets recycled or not. For Austin, this is extremely lame.
- There are a bunch of crazy people who subsist on disability living here, and they drive their garbage to the dumpster on the hoods of their cars, which is where they keep it the rest of the time. They will also take your laundry out of the dryer and throw it on the filthy laundry room floor. I think creeks must attract hicks.
- Creeks also attract animals. Our neighbors leave out food for stray cats (I guess they're hoping to increase the number of feral ones around here) and opossums will climb up to the 3rd floor to eat it. Then they take over the walkway and will hiss at you and not let you walk to your apartment. But this is a seasonal thing and depends on how stupid your particular neighbors are.

Upsides:
- It's pretty safe for the price and proximity to 2 highways (one of our cars was broken into here once, but the CD player faceplate had been left on). The structural design makes break-ins difficult (except in the 1st-floor apartments that have little private backyards). We're next door to a used car lot, and that doesn't seem to be a problem, either.
- Maintenance is pretty good, especially considering how busy they are all the time because the buildings are so old and crappy. The head maintenance guy is the president of the Austin Historical Society and he's really interesting and very nice. If the maintenance guys get several perfect reviews from you after fixing your stuff, they get a day paid vacation, and then they will be your friend forever.
- The apartments are constantly being updated in between tenants as more of them fall apart too much to rent otherwise, so chances are you may get a unit with something brand new in it--ours had brand new kitchen cabinets and tile countertops.
- We live on the edge of a fairly well-to-do neighborhood of houses that sell for over $200,000 and has Shoal Creek running through the middle of it, so it feels like a pretty desirable location, and we've got every type of business you want close by on Anderson or Burnet, but not *too* close.
- Like I said, this place is mostly inhabited by crazy old people, and the rest of us are mostly poor families, not a ton of rowdy college kids or anything. Only once in 3 years were we kept up at night by someone's party.
- Nothing has ever been bad enough to make it worth moving (until we had to relocate for graduate school). Compared to every other place we've lived in Austin, this place is a palace, *and* it costs less.

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