Apartment Review for The Alameda Gardens

I have considered many times breaking my lease (roughly $2000 fee) and cutting my losses with this place. Living here has been a miserable experience and here's why:

1) Management doesn't care about tenants. They lied about how they told the repair man we needed help. They lied about how they had free wireless internet (it does exist but only works occasionally). The woman who runs this place, Ann, is unfriendly and I don't trust her. The repair guy makes my wife feel uncomfortable and makes jokes to her that make her feel bad. He also lied about the specifics of what he did in our unit when we weren't home.

2) The buildings are very old (circa mid 60's) and are in very poor repair. I want to list specifics but as I am still living here, I don't want to be identified. Suffice to say the plumbing just falls apart (rust?) and tiles that were cemented to the underside of the outside walkway above the first floor apartments were close to falling off until they recently removed them. Sometimes at night I would hear one fall and break apart on the pavement below... The maintenance people tried fixing the water heaters back in August. First they didn't tell us they were turning off the water. Then the hot water didn't work at all for a few days and when it finally did work, it had a large amount of what I would call coarse sand in it. They tell us this is calcium and that we should just run our hot water down the drain until it goes away. We tried that and it didn't work. In fact, the problem recently got worse.

3) Safety: not counting the repair guy who makes my wife feel uncomfortable, our friend's car was broken into while parked outside on the street. There is a soup kitchen about 2 or 3 blocks down the street and we often have homeless people digging through our on-site dumpsters. They have never given me trouble but it's a sign of the low land value, low income neighborhood we live near. Young people who live in the Avalon community across the street sometimes race cars right by our place and we also see them around swearing and yelling.

I could really go on and on but you get the point. Good luck finding some place else. It would really be worth the effort.