Kings Gate West Apartments

The apartments are spacious and look nice when you first move in. But they don’t maintain them well, and the management is very confrontational and unpleasant. They tout their pool, but it’s seldom open. They don’t open it until mid-​June, it will be closed on Labor Day, and the hours are very limited because they don’t want to pay lifeguards. They leave you flyers announcing events and such, but their notes always have a nasty streak. They host a cook out, and then scold you not to come early, don’t ask for more than 1 hot dog and when the food’s gone it’s gone. Their snow removal is terrible. When appliances break, they give you old ones that another apartment got rid of, so you’re just trading one broken appliance for another. They won’t repaint your apartment or replace worn carpeting. They wait for you to move out. Stuff like that. A couple of the ladies who work in the office are nice, but Rick, the head of the property, is the problem. A very unpleasant man. Nice apartments, but expensive and you don’t get the amenities you think you are getting.

I had written this review on February 13^th. I didn’t post it because I didn’t want to deal with the completely anticipated emotional repercussions from Kings Gate Management, but nevertheless, it came anyway.
Written in February: «For the third time since Christmas, I have woken up to a bathroom floor soaked from a leak in the apartment above me. Not in one bathroom, but both of my bathrooms. I’m listening to a bucket in one of these bathrooms fill up at a rate of one drop every three or four seconds as I type this. It is the sound of toilet water coming through my ceiling, folks. My neighbors upstairs might have no idea that sometimes my first experience of the day is having their excrement drip onto my head.
For the most part, issues like these have been quickly and properly handled. Three ceiling leaks in two months, though? Not normal. They are starting to act annoyed when we call them to come fix the issue — as if my favorite thing to do is wake up in the morning and walk through a literal waterfall of crap and its crappy puddles on my way to the shower.
It’s not.»
This went on for ten days. Ten consecutive days. We couldn’t use one or more of our bathrooms for a period of 15 cumulative days over two and a half months. Did I want a rent reduction? I sure did. I asked for one. Instead, we were told that we had to take time out of our work schedule to have a conversation with the property manager because rent reductions aren’t part of their policy. Their policy is to get mad that you’re mad that sewage comes through your bathroom ceiling…
We declined the meeting because the first time we were offered a meeting with the property manager, it was shortly after being physically threatened (over a parking spot…) by one of our neighbors in the presence of my three-​year-​old son. We called the police on her and filed a report. In that meeting we were told how lucky we were to have laundry in our building. Guess what. We wouldn’t have lived in a place where there wasn’t laundry in our building. It’s not like we had childhood dreams of living in Kings Gate and found ourselves shocked and blessed upon our arrival. It was a prerequisite. Further, two of the machines either smelled like mildew or flat out barely worked in the two years we were there. I’m not sure how many times we called about that either. I certainly don’t miss paying the extra $ 3 every time I actually wanted my laundry dry.
In any case, we never got our rent reduction. We never even really got around to that part of the conversation in his little hostage pow-​wow. We were given some lame excuse for why he didn’t want to rent to us anymore. What we were told is that I had mentioned something about having a big stereo and that if I wanted to, I could make it very loud. I promise you that they were tired of our complaining about the leaks and the noise so the property manager went to the maintenance manager and said «what do we have on these guys?» Then the maintenance manager totally flipped on us after what was a completely cordial conversation and said «the guy said something about having a big stereo.» That’s a big enough offense that they’ll choose to no longer do business with you, by the way. Go ahead and threaten your neighbors in front of their children. That’s acceptable behavior at King’s Gate.
The hilarious part was at the end he said «why do you want to live here anyway?» That’s when — after a half hour of his nonsense — we both exclaimed «we don’t! We’re closing on a house and we’re asking for a month to month while we close. We’ll pay the month-​to-​month rate increase.» Then even that became such a difficult and petty thing that we just moved out before the end of the month. We cleaned the apartment to what I consider to be acceptable standards after two years of living in a dwelling with no forced air, and waited to get screwed on our security deposit.
The bottom line was that we weren’t pouring with enough appreciation of the things we did have at King’s Gate. I’m not kidding. Every time we got around to something acceptable about the property in our meeting, he wanted to wax in the praise as if basic living standards are a luxury that other tenants at Kings Gate don’t get other places. Maybe his father didn’t tell him «good job» enough, but the guy certainly is desperate for praise. I should have been thankful for the 9 months in 2014 – 2015 that my bathrooms didn’t leak on my head?