Apartment Review for College Park Apartments

In 40 years of apartment living, College Park is the worst place I have ever lived--and I have lived in some bad places around the world. Construction, design, security, management, garbage collection, maintenance and other elements are all inadequate. The rough and poorly poured concrete hallways are never swept or cleaned—as a result they can be extremely stained and unpleasant. The same cigarettes butts remained on the landing in my building for more than a year. Fast food detritus often littered the walkways for months. The dumpsters often overflow with raw garbage. Floors and walls are so poorly constructed you can clearly hear neighbors’ conversations, not to mention sexual activity and other sounds. When someone walks up the stairs outside your apartment, your floor literally shakes—if you sleep on a futon, it is enough to wake you up. You can hear a neighbor lighting a cigarette and then immediately smell the smoke. If your neighbors party, the noise and smoke fills your apartment—the walls shake and your clothes pick up the smoke odor. Even a single person smoking in a neighboring apartment brings smoke into your apartment. Dogs often bark endlessly. Some residents leave for a day or two and put their dogs on the balcony, where the dogs bark day and night.

The population includes an uncomfortable and explosive combination of young undergraduate students, graduate students and non-students. The young undergraduate students often have open parties where there can be as many as fifty people partying loudly with extremely loud music and heavy illegal drug use all night long. Security is ineffective in shutting down these parties. If you live in the same building as one of these frequent parties, it is impossible to sleep and you are subjected to continual scenes such as drunken underage women screaming and crying in the hallways as they are pressured to offer sex for drugs.

There is widespread illegal drug use. Some wealthier students live in a dorm and keep a College Park apartment for the sole purpose of running wild parties there a few times a week and having a place where they can use illegal drugs and practice underage drinking openly. By illegal drugs, I am not only referring to marijuana, but also everything you can imagine, including cocaine and acid. And I should make it clear, I am not commenting on drug use per se here--only how the irresponsible behavior exhibited by many illegal drug-using young undergraduates adversely affects people around them.

If you are looking for an apartment you can trash with frequent open parties and if you want to score almost any illegal drug easily and if you have absolutely no sense of community responsibility or consideration for neighbors, then the high-priced apartments of College Park are a good fit. If you are looking for anything resembling sane living, I could never advise College Park to anyone.

By the way, I and at least one other College Park resident (in another building) has observed or experienced everything mentioned above.