Illini Tower

I live in Illini Tower now, and I’m afraid that spring semester is coming because that means I am forced to live another 16 weeks in this horrifying place.
Everything people have said above is right, but one thing: if IT really only cares about money, wouldn’t they have better service and lower price so they can attract more students in the future? It’s one of the Seven Wonders of U of I that IT hasn’t closed down yet.
Just to add one more, I looked up the lease contract last night to see if I can cancel the lease-​I know, I was too naïve read the contract then. This is what the contract says about lease cancellation:
«…you may not cancel this Lease for any reason, including, but not limited to, voluntary or involuntary school withdrawal or transfer, marriage, divorce, pregnancy, loss of roommate, bad health, or any other reason other than death, unless agreed to in writing by us.»
So the only way I can get out of IT is killing myself.

Beware! Stay away from this place. My son lived here for one year and it was a truly awful experience. When we first visited they showed us a display room that is far better then what you end up getting. The rooms are dirty and not taken care of. The cost is unbelievably high considering the food is so bad that my son was forced to eat somewhere else even though he had signed up for a meal plan. He had signed a year lease and when he tried to reduce the plan second semester they wouldn’t let him. My son found moldy bread and sour milk at their dining hall.
They will also try to stick you with extra cleaning charges once you leave, even if you clean it thoroughly.
It’s only redeeming quality is it is close to campus but I would advise that it would be better to walk a mile every day than live here.
There are other very nice places to live if you go to U of I and other companies that care about the properties they manage. Please believe myself and the other reviewers when we say that you do not want to have your child live here.

1 start too many for this place. Living here hasn’t been the best experience, and here’s why:
1. To get to your room, you will spend at least 6 minutes. First, waiting for the elevator. Okay, this may be excusable — it gets busy at times. But what isn’t is the fact that I have to wait three minutes outside my door every day because the key cards fail to work. Every. Single. Time.
2. Way to expensive for what I get. So I don’t have a meal plan, and I share a room and live with 4 girls total. For one-​fourth of a bedroom, one bathroom, and one tiny kitchen, I pay $ 750. You can find apartments on Green Street for much cheaper — but again, I get it. It’s private housing.
3. Maintenance. Toilet not working? Shower head acting weird? Well, wait it out because maintenance takes anywhere to 1 – 2 days to fix something.
4. Since we’re on the topic of bathrooms — the shower is the dirtiest thing I’ve seen. Oh yeah, the lock on our bathroom door doesn’t work either.
5. When I moved in, the walls were not painted. There was pencil drawn cartoon by my bed. How cute! I’ll probably get charged for it when I move out.
6. Laundry machines: $ 5 to buy the card only. You have to add more money in to use the machines. Whereas — ya know — other places take quarters and don’t charge you anything. And half the machines don’t work.
7. Front desk: they’re usually super nice, but why is there always a crowd by them when you need something? I actually had to wait for them to finish their conversation with a friend so I get my package. wut?

Beware– the misleading 5 star reviews are written by the Illini Tower staff themselves, and they are paying students to write 5 star reviews.
Recently, Campus Living Villages (the company running IT) has hired a brand new general manager and a brand new maintenance, food and RA staff, but these people did little to nothing to improve the conditions of IT. Roy Myles, the new general manager, lied and mislead everyone about the improvements he was going to make once he starts his new job.
In fact, if I were going to list all of the bad things about this place, I might as well write a book about it. I’ll start with the obvious. First, this dump has got to be demolished. It is a worn-​out building built in the 1960’s that has not been renovated since. On the U of I campus, there are 2 dorms in the six pack that are rated «worst dorms in America». I visited those dorms and those were in better shape than IT!!! The only part of the building that looks «nice» is the lobby area– which was renovated intentionally in order to trick visitors, prospective students and parents into signing a lease.
The IT staff, when giving tours, use the SAME ROOM, which is never occupied so it looks brand new. But in reality, your room will most likely be in god-​awful condition. On move-​in day, I tested my water, heat and AC to see if it works. All 3 were broken and the maintenance crew took about a week to fix. My first week at IT was WITHOUT water and AC!!!
Speaking of AC, heating and water, the maintenance crew shuts off the AC after Thanksgiving and never bothered to turn on the heat during winter. The entire winter, there was no heat, even that one day with -20 °F. That is illegal and on the grounds for a lawsuit. IT does not bother to shovel the sidewalks and the entrances when it snows, which again, is a violation of snow removal laws in Champaign. The reason for all this, is to SAVE MONEY, while leaving residents with literally nothing.
The social life in this place is lacking and close to non-​existent. 90% of the student body here is international Chinese students, many of whom prefer to study and are not as sociable as American students. I feel pity for them, as I want them to experience a diverse student body like in other dorms. (If someone here is from China and could translate my review to Chinese for them, that would be greatly appreciated. I want them to avoid this place as well).
The food, is simply disgusting and poorly prepared. It literally looks like a 5 year old cooked it. The cafeteria crew consists of ex-​convicts, felons and murderers. In essence, all the food is cheap, unhealthy and uncooked. A majority of the food is canned. The worst part is, THEY SERVE LEFTOVERS for 3 days straight! Everything is deep-​fried, and the salad bar is not fresh at all. One time, I noticed a bug in the lettuce. As one reviewer put it, «it gets old quick». Your credits don’t roll over to the next semester, and it is a way to ensure that they make extra money off of you.
The internet is poor, and unreliable. Service shuts down nearly every week for hours at a time. In the rooms, poor attempts at making it «look nice and modern» were made, but ended up failing. For example, a piece of unpainted plywood was nailed to the wall as a make-​shift shelf.
Also, TONS of hidden fees for the smallest of reasons. At the end of the semester, every resident gets charged a $ 25 «damage» fee, without explanation. The cost of this place is nearly 3 times the cost of regular university housing, which is a lot better. For both semesters you will pay: ~$ 16,000 for your room, $ 6,000 for a meal plan, $ 2,000 for parking privileges, nearly $ 1,000 for laundry and $ 50 in extra fines, which equate to a total of $ 25,000. That’s 2x more than the cost of tuition!
With all the money that IT is taking in from residents, they refuse to use it for any building or service improvements. For example, the elevators are old, from the 70’s, and are slow. Staircase use are forbidden. The hallways contains wall coverings, carpets and ceiling panels from the 70’s. The rooms themselves are disgusting, and will likely have holes in the walls, mold and dust everywhere. The walls are thin and everything you say will be heard from your neighbors next door. You can hear even the toilets flushing next door and in the floors below and above you. This place has violated numerous building safety inspections in the past, but the management team never does anything about it.
In essence, this place is appalling and sickening. If anyone knows a bit of American history in the early 1900’s, imagine the poor and crowded tenements that urban factory workers lived in. IT would be equivalent to that. No wonder every year, IT has seen a decline in leases. Muckraking journalists in the early 1900’s who exposed the public to the horrors and misery of crowded filthy apartments have successfully shut them down. Maybe U of I students should do the same to IT in 2015!

Parents and students, please avoid Illini Tower, avoid Campus Living Villages properties, so you will avoid trouble and unhappiness ahead. Not to mention canned food, dirty rooms which other people already mentioned. My daughter and her 3 roommates also had to work on the toilet every time it was used. The worst part is Illini Tower managers only care about money. When I called Marta Kazmierczak (from Campus Living Villages) and signed for the lease, I asked about the $ 100 referral for my friend. She said there is no referral at all. I thought maybe the advertisement I just saw was expired. But later when I went back on their website, the $ 100 referral ad was still there! I didn’t bother to ask again. After paying the processing fee, she asked for $ 350 nonrefundable fee. To date, I still don’t know what that was for. These don’t prompt me to writing a review until they forced me to pay hidden preexisting damages.
A couple of weeks before the school ended, one girl moved a sofa looking for her stuff. She saw a fingertip sized dent on the wall behind the sofa. She reported to the building maintenance right away. No one responded. Two months after school finished everyone received $ 25 damage charge. $ 25 is nothing but I think I need to stand up against this greedy company and its employees. I talked to manager Eric Kappelmann (from Campus Living Villages) that the dent was behind the sofa and it was there before the girls moving in. There was no way that the girls damaged the wall behind the sofa while everywhere else was all right. They argued that the contract we signed requiring us to check preexisting damages before moving in. I told them the damage was behind the sofa. The contract doesn’t say we need to move sofa, beds, cabinets and other furniture to inspect. Will anyone move the furniture to inspect the preexisting damage? They charged the students excessively for the poor job they did when the previous residents moved out. When I disputed this charge with them, Agatha Thomas (from Campus Living Villages) threatened to send the charge to the collection agency and she did and she won $ 25.They won $ 25 ($ 100 in total), but they got their bad name. Illini Tower (Campus Living Villages) and BYL Collection Services are working together. If they want to charge you anything, you have to pay since you don’t want your credit to be ruined by Campus Living Villages.

It’s a shame that can’t give negative stars. Starting from basement, ceiling drops disgusting stuff on your car ²⁴⁄₇. In the laundry room, three out of six driers are usual broken. Food is terrible and meal plans are extremely expensive and worthless. Internet is down at least once a week! Walls are think as the fk, I promise you can hear everything next door! Don’t live here please!

Living at IT was horrible. Bad food, terrible phony management. Elevators always broke. All of the cafeteria staff quit in 2012, and they started forcing RAs to work in the cafeteria unpaid. The management is just ABUSIVE to their staff. Do not live here.
I wanted to live in a two bedroom apartment for two people but they had filled all of those units so they put me in a regular 4 person room and promised that I would only get one roommate if someone moved in, since I was paying for the price of a double. Midway through winter break I get an email telling me two strange girls are moving in. They do not consult you about roommate matching if you don’t specifically request one.

I live across the street from IT and eat meals there on occasion because it’s convenient.
You can only eat steamed grey green beans, slippery chicken, and deep-​fried cholesterol balls so many times before it gets old. And the crappy thing about IT is that meals don’t roll over if they aren’t used by the end of the semester. Essentially, it’s a way to make sure that they will always make a profit.
While it’s nice that they have a salad bar (and they market the hell out of it), you can only eat the same thing so many times before you start to want something tasty and healthy.
Last year they seemed to make an effort to offer «specialty» bars every day when students started complaining. This year it’s down to once or twice a week.
If I had the opportunity to go back in time, I would ditch an IT meal plan and buy my own food. I’ve been less than satisfied.
If it weren’t for some of the kind staff that work in the dining hall IT would not be doing such good business.
But seriously, $ 7 for a plate of bland, deep fried meat and some steamed vegetables is not worth it.