Kodiak La Grande Apartments

Current tenant. Wish I had read the other review before renting. Not looking forward to the moving out process, though I am very much looking forward to moving out.
It was a good price and has a great location, but the apartment manager is awful. Get everything she ever says in writing. She will change her story after the fact and claim that she told you things she did not tell you, and that you agreed to things that you did not even discuss. This has happened to me multiple times with her.
She’s quick to use the tactic of «I report to my manager and he’s going to give me a hard time. You understand, don’t you?» to attempt to emotionally manipulate you into giving into her. She is quick to assume that you are incompetent and malicious before checking to see if there was a miscommunication. She tries to give you charges that she does not legally have the right to give you.
You can manage it if you know your legal rights and get everything in writing, but it takes some fighting and stress. I’ve talked to other tenants and they’ve experienced similar things, sometimes to the point of having to threaten to go to court before she backed down because she did not actually have any legal right to the money she was demanding.
Apartments themselves are decent and she’s good about getting repairs scheduled, but if you can find a better place you should probably take it.

We thought we would like it here because of the walk-​in closets and reasonable rent. Unfortunately, it was horrible. The lease says you have to pay to repaint the apartment if you live there less than 3 years but this is AGAINST the California tenant laws (look it up– they’re only allowed to charge for repainting if there’s damage). She also told us we had to clean the outside of all the windows, BEHIND the screens, meaning we had to remove the screens then clean the windows. This is also illegal because you can’t ask 2^nd floor tenants to do such a thing. About a month before we moved out, we let her handymen go through our bathroom ceiling to fix a plumbing problem in the unit above us. The handymen tracked dirt, debris, and plaster all over our apartment and didn’t clean up after themselves. Some dirt, debris and plaster even went down the shower drain. We warned Doreen that it probably clogged the drain but she said she wouldn’t charge us for that since it wasn’t our fault. But when we got our security deposit, guess what was deducted!!! Money to unclog the drain!!! I demanded to know why we got charged and she claimed it was because the drains were clogged with hair only. When I asked to know the last time those drains were unclogged, she couldn’t tell me. So I might have been paying for a clog starting with 2 – 3 tenants before me. She also charged us a $ 75 cleaning fee even though we cleaned the place top to bottom. When I asked what wasn’t clean, she said the oven had some stains and the dishwasher drain. $ 75!!! Ya right!!!
She didn’t want to mark down the flaws in the apartment during our walk-​through when we moved in, saying we wouldn’t be charged for damage to appliances/​shelving that were already worn. I insisted she write it down anyway. Thank goodness I did or I probably wouldn’t have gotten any of my deposit back at all.
There was always a lot of noise coming from the street in the middle of the night. The fire department and police would come onto our block 1−2x a month in the middle of the night and drivers would blast their radios in the middle of the night also.
DON’T RENT HERE!!! THEY CHARGE ILLEGAL CLEANING/​PAINTING FEES THAT THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH BECAUSE YOU HAVE UNKNOWINGLY SIGNED YOUR AGREEMENT TO THESE IN YOUR LEASE. IF YOU DO DECIDE TO RENT HERE, MAKE SURE YOU TAKE PHOTOS OF YOUR APARTMENT WHEN YOU MOVE IN AND PHOTOS OF WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN YOU MOVE OUT AND DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME CLEANING IT BECAUSE SHE’S GOING TO CHARGE YOU A CLEANING FEE ANYWAY.