Review for Metropolitan Towers Apartments

Parking has always been an issue if you arrive home any later then 6pm. In some cases you have to park over at one of the other buildings and make a minute or two walk to your building. Garages are available but cost another $40 a month. The parking lot isn't all that well lit at night and can seem a bit sketchy (my girlfriend hates coming home at night). Some of the people living in the building have broken into cars at night (one attempted to get into my girlfriend's SUV until we scared him off and watched him walk back to his apartment). Management did nothing more then put up a note on the doors telling people not to leave things in their vehicles rather then addressing it with the resident. Kids play in the parking lot close to cars and cause dents and dings from time to time. Many times questionable characters sit in their cars in the parking lot for hours. Several have made rude comments to my girlfriend.

Airplanes taking off and landing every 30 seconds to 2 minutes most of the day until around 11pm at night every day get wearing after a while. The constant noise makes it impossible to watch TV with the windows open in the summer. The airport commission replaced the windows a couple summers ago and there's almost no airplane noise with the windows closed.

The lobby and hallways are pretty old and bland. Cheap wallboard in the hallways has a quick and dirty white wash paint job and the panels have gaps between them making it look like a bunch of high school carpenters threw it together in an afternoon. The carpet is pretty old and funky in the hallways. Hallways regularly smell of cigarettes, marijuana and rotten food.

Staff members have been fairly good about addressing maintenance issues when they're made aware of them. Laundry machines are frequently out of order for several days though. Rent payment envelopes are delivered under your door at random times. Sometimes they drop them off a week before rent is due and other times you don't get them until a day or so before it's due. No option for automatic rent payments to be taken from your account.

Many of the apartment doors (including my own) show signs that they've been kicked in at some point (either by police or burglars) and patched up instead of replaced. Not the most secure. Water stains on the ceiling were never taken care of or even painted over. One sink in the bathroom drains very slowly and all the staff ever did was pour some Drano down it and say it was good. This resolved the issue for about 2 days each time but still never made it as well draining as the other sink. Kitchen sinks hot water takes a minute or two to become warm (although the bathroom water becomes hot very quickly). Kitchen appliances are old and the kitchen cupboards are pretty horrid looking. Kitchen floor will never show dirt as it looks dirty even when cleaned. Cracked tiles by sliding door were never replaced. Balcony wood could really use a good power washing as it appears green in color and is a bit slick with moss.

Walls are fairly thin and you can hear people in the other apartments talking at times. The floors creek in most places when you walk and the carpet is an unappealing light blue. There are some spots that seem that they carpeted over something like a board or who knows what and you can feel the carpet is higher there. Very strange. Recently the installed a carbon monoxide detector in the hallway right between the bathroom and bedroom. It's right at shoulder level and looks very out of place. Very stupid placement considering the nature of carbon monoxide. It fills the room from the bottom up. Once the gas got to the level that it setup the detector you'd already be dead laying in bed unless you had a bet that's taller then shoulder level. Bathroom fans run 24/7 and sometimes pull the smoke smell from other apartments into your bathroom. Water drain pipe from the roof makes dripping noises for a day or two after each rain storm and gets annoying listening to it drip drip drip while you try to goto bed at night.

Nice amount of storage space (including a decent sized walk-in closet in the front entry way and a storage closet down the hall I never used. Bathroom could use better cabinets to store things so you don't have to have them sitting out on the counter. Bedrooms are very large which is nice and a downside at the same time. If you have a TON of stuff or spend a lot of time in the bedroom it may be nice but the space would be better used to make the kitchen more useable or allow the dining room to fit more then just a small table. The alcove in the living room is kind of worthless. Ceiling fans in the bedroom and dining room are nice but even with the fan running in the dining room 24/7 the cool air from the A/C just a couple feet away never makes it's way into the kitchen/dining room area for some strange reason.

Only a single cable jack in the house. This is a problem if you want to use more then one TV or have cable internet. Garbage dumpster is emptied often but the recycling dumpster is almost always overflowing. Now that I think about it, in the +3 years I've been here I've never seen it not overflowing. Makes it hard to recycle. There's frequently trash laying around the dumpster area which is right in the parking lot.

Biggest selling points are the large space of the one bedroom with den for the price and the location close to the airport if you travel a lot like I do. I don't believe these things outweigh the negatives at this place though.