Its like being in a dorm without the convenience of living right on campus. The deal with paying the lease is that you pay half a year up front and the other half in January. That way you don't have to worry about making rent every month, its already taken care of. The complex is gated with an alarm and you have to have a key to get through the gate so that's nice but it is in a really bad side of town.
The rooms are small and if you go with the cheapest option of $360 a month, you have a roommate. They have a roommate matching system that you can go through to choose what kind of roommate that you want but I did not get the roommate that I had requested. They're suppose to give you their information so that you two could talk and get to know each other before living together. I was never given anything and only met my roommate on the day I was moving in. She was awful. She never took out the trash from her side of the room and since she was on the side closest to the door, I had to wade through the overflow of trash to get out the door every morning and again every time I came back. It was disgusting, I don't know how anyone can live like that. She also never washed her dishes and would let them pill up. In a studio apartment, it makes it hard to prep and cook dinner and wash my dishes when hers are all in the sink. She always says she would clean up but never does.
The building that the apartments are in is 4 floors high. There is an elevator which makes it easier when you have groceries and live on the 4th floor. The rooms are okay, and the hallways look like their from a horror film. They desperately need a makeover. They do have a lot of amenities though such as a reasonable sized swimming pool, hot tub, workout room, theater, and study room (although wifi in that room was horrible and the printers never worked). The office staff was friendly but sometimes a little too friendly. One would hug me every time he saw me so I avoided him whenever I could.
Every floor has a laundry room that is operated by this cards that you would load money onto and use as currency. The cards are $5 which is annoying since they don't give you the options of coins so you have to get the card. The laundry rooms consist of one washer and one dryer, priced relatively cheap but when you have to run all your clothes through the dryer 3 times before its dry, it becomes pricey. Yes, they say not to overload the dryers but I once did just a load of two towels and I still had to run them through the dryer twice. It's really annoying having to pay for something that does something halfway.
Commute to campus is easy since they have a shuttle that runs one way every half hour. The shuttle themselves are dreadful. The door to the van felt like it would go flying off if the shuttle took a turn a little too sharp. The bus is also not that great. Its not comfortable and old. They were getting a new bus when I was moving out. They said it would run on solar power and be made entirely of glass, and in Arizona, I don't need to tell you why that's a bad idea.
For the price that it is, its not bad but I wouldn't recommend it unless you had very little money and no other choice. If I had to do it all over again, I would just pay for a full room to myself but for that price, I can find a nicer place elsewhere. All in all, you get what you pay for.
