Arbors of Anderson

I moved to Arbors of Anderson (AA) from out of state, and I had to do all of my research online – I couldn’t afford to fly out to Ohio. For some reason, I ignored all the negative reviews of AA, deciding to dismiss them all as whining. After all, the photos on AA’s website looked beautiful – how bad could the place be?
Big mistake.
But first, the pros:
— Lots of trees, as the name suggests. The complex itself is quite pretty, rustic enough that you’d never suspect that it’s:
— Just a block from 275 & Beechmont, making it ridiculously easy to get around.
— Even though my apartment faced the driveway, it was nearly always very quiet at night. I rarely heard my neighbors outside, and I never heard them thru the walls or floor.
— They always have free cookies in the front office.
Okay, enough Mister Nice Guy:
— The HVAC is so loud, it sounds like a diesel engine’s in your closet.
— The bathroom sinks are so low, they’re more like bidets.
— The front door springs shut, making it difficult to carry in groceries; the refrigerator door, on the other hand, wouldn’t shut unless you pushed it all the way.
— The fixtures are cheap, e.g. the water heater is not insulated.
— The toilets quickly develop mold beneath the lids; I had to scrub them clean every five days.
— The biggest problem is the front office. So long as I didn’t need anything from them, they were fine, but moving in and out was hell. The staff constantly contradicted themselves, always with the result of me having to pay them more money. I always paid and never gave them an attitude, yet every time I walked into the front office, I was treated as though I were an enemy. I’ve lived in about a dozen different apartments in my life, and theirs was the worst management I’ve ever experienced.
— They promised to clean the carpets before I moved in; they didn’t.
— I was told that everything was electrically heated, but they didn’t tell me that the water is heated by gas. Ohio gas is very expensive, especially since the water heater is not insulated well. I therefore often ran out of hot water.
— Speaking of cold, my bedroom was contantly freezing because of the room’s poor insulation. I figured out that I could keep it a bit warmer by closing the closet door, which turned the closet into a meat locker.
— The wall paint is scented. Not only did it smell a lot like mold, but it provoked intense allergic reactions in my wife. Management claimed that they’d never heard complaints before, but the maintenance crew told us that they’d often complained about it because they react to it also. So not only did they lie but they also don’t seem to care about the well-​being of the competent members of their staff. Because maintenance testified that we weren’t making up our symptoms, management reluctantly agreed to allow maintenance to repaint the place with normal paint, which cleared up everyone’s symptoms.
What more do I need to say? As I later learned, there are plenty of much nicer places available for cheaper rent than at AA. I tried to sublet the place, but in two months, I found no takers. I had to break the lease, though, and they charged me a penalty of two months’ worth of rent.