Review for Avalon At Media Center Apartments

I agree with the other poster that this place is hellish; the staff need to say less and do more! Office staff turnover is high (We haven't been here a year and we've been here longer than half of the office staff). They act to my face like my complaints (disruptive neighbors) are taken seriously but then they do nothing about it (they call them when they are not home and then send a form letter). I also live in a non-dog building with a noisy barking dog that I have complained about for over a month and they refuse to evict the new residents, basically telling me that they can't help us and that if they were in our position they would move out when their lease ends, so that is what we are planning to do.

Walls and floors are worse than paper thin since vibrations are not dampened but amplified! Luckily most of our immediate neighbors are fairly quiet, but I can hear the guy below when he coughs, laughs, watches TV, talks on the phone, or slams a cupboard in the kitchen, or walks around---it's like living in a haunted house (I'm sure it's worse for him, hearing us, but that means in return that WE have no privacy.) When people talk loudly and laugh in the courtyard I get no peace (all 32 units have doors opening into the echo-prone courtyard, and our unit is a studio apartment which means that my bedroom window has people stomping by every day, inches away). When loud parties happen (11pm-2am) Police and security come but disruptive residents are not punished whatsoever. (Well there was that guy that almost killed his roommate in the middle of the night in a loud fight in the courtyard and got taken off to jail. That shook me all day the next day. At least they got evicted.)

Our gas furnace hasn't worked right the whole time we've been here; when we first moved in, the furnace was on (in the middle of the summer!) and wouldn't turn off with the thermostat so I had to turn it off completely with help from the gas company. They were supposed to send someone to fix it (so I planned for this and put things out of sight, cleaned up, etc.) but no one showed up. I basically have ample reason not to trust management. (Although I hear the maintenance people are very professional and kind, at least that one time they fixed our kitchen light which used to take around 2 minutes to turn on.) To top it off, our bathroom door has come stripped off the screws twice, which we've fixed ourselves. The kitchen sink knobs barely work right (they are either totally on or totally off, which makes doing dishes difficult, since we have no dishwasher). Also, the space for the refrigerator is meant for a small fridge, not a normal size fridge, which is what we have. The main door to the apartment building has a lock which gets my key stuck spinning every time I try to enter the building.

Climatewise, insulation is pretty terrible; window sills are made of aluminum, block out no sound or temperature differences, and our apartment gets very hot during the day (and there is no central HVAC). When we first moved in, the place smelled horribly of tobacco smoke even though they had cleaned the carpet and painted (scrubbed?) the walls. Maintenance brought in an ozone machine which helped some, but finally they had to clean the AC unit with ammonia and that did the trick.

In terms of redeeming features, the cabinet space is nice and well thought out (like having a pantry), making good use of a cramped studio apartment. Landscaping is great and the location (near Vons and Toluca Lake, close to freeway) is favorable. I have a covered parking spot, but street parking probably requires searching and walking a bit. (We have one car.)

Who knows you may get lucky and have great neighbors and a better courtyard layout but we just want a place to call home; this is not it.