An earlier reviewer said not to judge a book by its cover. I'll concur: the cover at PCV is great - pretty apartment buildings, easy access to everything, great workout room and swimming pool. The read - living there, that is - is a bit lousier.

When we first moved in the AC didn't work. The washer/dryer provided were utterly lousy. The lady who drew up our lease told us they'd move them out because we already owned a washer/dryer, but after we had moved in she said she'd made no such promise, so we had to use our balcony storage space for them.

The walls WERE paper thin and the roads nearby (Sandhill & 1430 South) were extremely noisy at night and it seemed like the traffic never slowed - not even at 2 am. Trains came through frequently (the tracks are across the interstate, but it's still awfully loud).

The fixtures were the worst part of all. Every fixture they used in building the place was the dirt-cheapest they could find - the Venetian blinds were flimsy and didn't open evenly, the windows were hard to shut all the way, the closet door guides (that keep the closet doors on track) were shoddy, and the kitchen sink and toilets were CONSTANTLY getting clogged. (I've NEVER used a toilet that was both so easy to clog and so difficult to plunge.) The refrigerator was teeny-tiny.

In the summer they didn't just water the lawns - they turned them into rice paddies, so that when you walked on the grass it was like walking on mud. And, yes, maintenance was slow to respond to problems.

I will say that, contrary to earlier reviewers, I never noticed any problem with excessive smoking, people storing stuff in breezeways, or dirty stairwells. Most of the residents were quite friendly. At times, a few people were bad about leaving their doggy doodoo on the lawn, though.

There were at least 3 high-speed internet options: Comcast, Ygnition, & Qwest DSL.

Parking-wise, you got one reserved spot, but second-car parking was always a walk. Yes, everything in town is convenient - shopping, UVSC, bus-lines, the interstate - but you pay for that convenience with a shoddily built apt and a noisy location. Wanna get outta town on the weekend' The biggest way in and out (I-15) is almost always gridlocked on Friday nights.

As far as living in Orem/Provo goes, I wouldn't personally recommend it (we were neither LDS nor college students) because I think the community has no particular charm. Orem (thanks mostly to the Ashton family of WordPerfect fame) has a pretty good library, while Provo spent a bundle renovating an old BYU building and very little on books to fill it with. There is no countywide library system. UVSC is improving, but the state's 2nd-largest county really should have a much better state-funded college or university.

People here aren't willing to invest much (e.g., via taxes) to make the town better - schools are overcrowded, roads are overcrowded, and the only part of the economy that's really growing (in both Utah County and statewide) is the low-wage sector (see Deseret News, 9/25/04, "Resist building ghettos of future, advocates told").

Just this past week the Utah County commissioners killed a ballot initiative that would have given county voters the OPTION of raising taxes to improve local roads (see Deseret News, 9/15/04, "Brakes slammed on road-tax vote"). In 2002 county voters killed, by 62 to 38, a Parks, Arts, & Recreation tax. A desire for lower taxes is great, but some things, I feel, are worth spending money on. And while I consider myself to be VERY conservative, local politics all too often crosses into the far-right fringe. No inter-party political competition often means politicans feel like they're elected for life.

The best thing about this review is that most of it is verifiable - if you still wanna look at these apts or this town, check out the roads, the noise, the fridge, the fixtures, and so-on. You don't have to live there to know. gkZ41df9CgXQPfm8K2A7

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