Off campus apartments: your suggestions

akhbhaat
Sun, 14 Dec 2008 01:16:32 +0000

Give me the name(s) of the apartment complexes you’re interested in and I will tell you what I know about it. If I didn’t live there myself, I probably knew (and visited) somebody who did.

In any event, my advice is this: be very thorough. Talk to residents. Read reviews on ratings sites (e.g. apartmentratings.com). Pay very careful attention to the surrounding neighborhood, because people from those neighborhoods can and will wander onto the complex proper for any and all purposes (advice I wish I had known or taken before moving into Seminole Suites). A bad living arrangement can literally ruin an entire year, since you’ll be locked in for at least 12 months wherever you sign and the only way out is to eat the remainder of the lease up front. There are decent places to live - just do your due diligence and you’ll be fine.

Most of them suck, but the one complex I can categorically emphasize that you avoid is Frog Pond (I think it’s called Beach Club, now). It’s perhaps one step above an inner city public housing project and I wouldn’t wish it on any but my worst enemies.

Here’s what you can generally expect at any “student oriented” complex:

-Disorganized and/or corrupt management. At Seminole Suites, for instance, the leases that my roommates and I signed were fraudulently altered; I was only able to gain recourse because I had made my own copy of the original lease at the time of signing. Overcharging on utilities is common (maybe $15 here, $20 there - sometimes more - under the assumption that you’ll just pay it because taking it small claims court is not worth the hassle), as are illegitimate late fees or towing fines. My car was towed from Seminole Suites once by Hobkirk Towing despite the fact that I was a resident with a valid parking permit; neither the complex nor the towing company would reimburse me despite my threats and I ended up being out $88.

-Student complexes can be loud and obnoxious, especially on weekends. Such complexes are largely populated by younger undergrads and/or people who care more about parties than school. Look - I expected partying in a place like that. I also went to my own share of parties. But honestly, I didn’t want to live in a place where it was literally a way of life.

-Because you sign a lease for an individual bedroom, you’re out of luck if the management decides to move somebody in or out of your apartment. I had two horrible experiences with a “random” (roommate) - one at the Exchange, and one at Seminole Suites. The one in the Exchange invited ten of his best friends to live in our common room while running drugs out of our apartment (which culminated in a police raid on our unit - thankfully, that occurred after I had moved out). Management ignored our pleas to rectify that situation. The situation at SS was eventually resolved to my satisfaction. Don’t think this means that they won’t try to hold you liable for damage to the rest of the apartment - the Exchange tried to pin $1100 worth of damage to the rest of the unit on me and me alone (despite the fact that I left my own room in better shape than I found it - they just go after the one they think is most likely to pay). I threatened legal action and they eventually dropped the claim.

-Parking can be heinous. The aforementioned parties don’t help.

-Theft and vehicle break-ins are rampant. For example: during my second year at SS, my “random” roommate stumbled in drunk one night and left the front door unlocked in the process. Naturally, somebody walked right in and then stole $220 in cash and some other valuables from his bedroom, which was also unlocked. Without considering the circumstances, he flipped out and accused us of the theft (and so it began)…meanwhile, nobody thinks or looks twice at random people wandering through a student complex in the middle of the night - there are literally thousands of people living there and most people don’t even know who their neighbors are. I dodged that bullet somehow, despite the fact that I had a nice car and a nearly endless list of my friends had issues at some point or another. Maybe they thought my car belonged to the local drug czar and avoided it out of fear.

I don’t recognize all of the complexes listed above; presumably, these are either new(ish) or are complexes which have been renamed since I lived in Tallahassee.

By the time I went to grad school, I rounded up some good friends and we went out looking for a townhouse to rent. After three years of student apartment hell, getting into a neighborhood with “normal” people in a “normal” house drastically improved my quality of life.