Gorge View Apartments

I saw the 1-​star review and thought it was a bit unfair. It’s a low-​cost apartment in a ‘working class’ neighborhood. It is pet-​friendly which is a huge bonus — there are very few apartments that allow dogs in this city.
Complaining about the homeless wandering the neighborhood might be a valid complaint — but the whole city of Victoria is overrun with hundreds (thousands?) of street people. Downtown, James Bay, Saanich, etc. This is a problem everywhere in this city.
And I don’t get the complaint below about things like water stains on the ceiling. You are upset about it — but you don’t want to get it fixed? How does that make sense?

Ghetto! I have moved in this year 2015 and I can tell you that I was shocked. When we viewed the apartment, it was a quick viewing with the previous tenant’s furniture still in it. We were initially impressed with everything. Large pool, large hot tub, pool table, up to date weight room, racket ball court, and very pet friendly. We have a dog so the idea of the build giving out free doggy poop bags and having a nice green area for them to walk was very appealing. Unfortunately when we moved in, we become very disappointed and decided within the first week to give our notice as soon as the lease is up.
Here is a list of issues that we have:
— This building complex is in a very bad part of town. We often find transients/​homeless people camped out in the green area where the dogs walk.
— I found a syringe and needle just off the sidewalk area.
— There are lots of cigarette butts all over the area. I try to pick them up each day and each day they return and my dog always tend to have one in his mouth which is very dangerous for dogs.
— Speaking of cigarettes… It gets extremely hot in the apartment in the summer. You either face the sun in the first half of the day or the second half of the day. It gets to an average of 86 degrees F and we can’t leave the sliding glass doors open, because the smell of cigarette and marijuana smoke fills the apartment. Even if we left the doors open, it still doesn’t cool down the place. It seems to let more not air in. So we had to get an air conditioner which costs us an extra $ 50 a month to run.
— There are no screens on the doors or windows so if you plan to open them, flies, hornets and spiders quickly find their way in.
— There old defective vinyl vertical blinds that will not turn properly and the individual blinds keep braking off with very little moment. Got tired of asking the maintenance guy to repair them and you can’t take them down and put up your own curtains. They want to keep them up. I don’t know why!
— Our specific apartment has a front door with a huge crack in it. With a shattered peep hole and wiggly door knob. It looks like the previous tenant had anger management issues and the building manager didn’t fix it. The bathroom door was also kicked in and did a lame repair job with lots of paint which make the door stick every time.
— The ceiling has huge water stains in the living room and the carpet has numerous permanent stains that we didn’t’ see on the viewing because the tenant had a sectional carpet over top. We can’t get it replaced now, because all of our furniture is in and if they did repair (we’re not even sure it they would) then we have no place to put the furniture and stuff while it’s being done. They did shampoo the carpet, but that didn’t help.
— The cupboards are old and the vernier is peeling. It looks like a couple were torn off the hinges and had to be reset. The inside of the cupboards are in disgusting shape too.
— The balcony railing is very wobbly and we don’t feel safe leaning against it. It feels like it will go at any minute.
— They did give us $ 50 laundry card for their laundry room. There are 4 new washers and 6 new dryers. Which hold a lot of clothes, but there are I think about 50 to 100 tenants and that is not enough. Also, there is really no ventilation and it gets physically unbearably hot down there. You can’t spend any time there and forget about folding your clothes in that hot box! It’s get so busy that I have to do my laundry at 4 am.
Conclusion:
With all things considered, we have to pay around $ 1,050 for rent. That’s including the cost of hydro, parking and pay storage locker. We feel that this is far too much to ask for the low income style of building which this is or has become. We would not and do not recommend this place to anyone.