University View

The gym and conference room are fantastic, though I have yet to find an xbox as mentioned on the website. Also I don’t know how to change the channels or volumes on any of the televisions in the lounge. I can’t get cable in my room without a box, and half the time my phone isn’t connected to the internet. When the internet does work, it’s great. Parking is wonderful although the design of the parking garage is one of the stupidest I’ve ever encountered. Also the garage door on the side of the garage doesn’t work half the time. The retail options under the View 2 are convenient, but nothing I ever eat or buy. The most useful store is ⁷⁄₁₁ under the Varsity. There’s a liquor store out front that I’m not old enough to purchase liquor from. The actual view from my room is phenomenal. The windows open and close with a little extra effort. The bed is great except for the middle of the frame when I often hit my leg because it comes up above my mattress. The closet space is great, but the drawers in the dressers are too tiny for most of my clothes. The desk drawer is also too shallow to hold any desk supplies. The laundry is great; the cabinets are iffy but they work and there is plenty of cabinet and laundry room space. The lights are fine though there are some switches that seem not to turn anything on. The building is very secure, but accessible if you live here. I wish you could open the back door by the bridge from the outside, as you can with the side door. The entire staff is courteous and helpful and wonderful. Maintenance requests are fulfilled quickly, as soon as within the hour. Elevators are slow when busses are arriving, causing me to miss my bus more than once. The mail/​package system could be faster, but the email notifications are helpful. I wish I got charged less than my roommates for having the smallest room in the apartment, and I can’t always get into the cabinet under my sink when my bathroom door is open.
I know this review is a hot mess, but it’s all the good and the bad of living in the view. Any off-​campus apartment is going to be expensive, so why not live in the view?

The view is the best place to live off campus. The amenities are great and it’s a perfect location, easy to get to and from campus if you’re walking or biking. Make sure to buy a good mattress pad though, the beds aren’t the most comfy. Otherwise, best place to live.

I am highly disappointed in the middle of my year here. The utility allowance is $ 30 and I’m still having to pay beyond that, about 22 $. My roommate and I, are being super stingy and not even using the heater and still the utility is beyond the allowance. Besides, they had shown a completely different demo room and I got something absolutely different.
Just as I enter my apartment the kitchen starts and the hall ends. Yes it’s that small. The stove is right behind the door, so if you’re cooking and someone enters, bang.
Paying $ 999 and not getting the satisfaction you expected, is really disappointing.
I know I can’t do anything since I’m under the lease, but I can very well not continue living here and also not recommend others.

to sum up this review: I would give university view 0.5÷5 stars. my reasoning follows:
do NOT live at University View. you will only experience anger, frustration, regret, and a very light wallet. they will try to bill you for anything possible whether it be utilities or «damage» to your room or even using the printer.
if you don’t have a garage parking spot ($ 85/​mo) then your next best option is the school lot (lot 11) located behind the View. if you have to park in lot 11 you’re forced to pay «resident» rates (due to an agreement with the View and UMD DOTS) even though you technically don’t live on campus. on top of that you have to vacate your car from the lot 3 hrs prior to every home basketball game (about 15). you will likely park in another school lot, prob lot 1 located on the other side of campus, so then you have to move it back by 7 am. think about it, you have to drive your car from lot 11 to lot 1, park it, and walk back to the View or wherever you’re going. then, sometime between when the basketball game ends and lot 11 clears up, probably 11pm, you have to walk back to your car to drive it back to lot 11. your time is better spent than walking back and forth across campus to move your car, especially during the frigid winter. I don’t understand why we should pay for a parking spot we can’t use. basically, if you live at the View and have a car you will either get a garage spot and be ripped off or get a lot 11 spot and move your car constantly.
since I do not have a garage spot (because it was full), when I buy groceries I have to use a cart to load my groceries to bring to my room. you have to sign out carts at the main entrance by the office, but you can only wheel them out through the side entrance. by the way, you can’t park at the side entrance so essentially you have to park by the main entrance (if a spot is even available), rent the cart, wheel it through the garage and out the side door then back to the front where your car is, load your groceries, and wheel back again to the side entrance. if you try to go through the front entrance the guard will give you a hard time because the wheels will scratch the floor. all you wanna do is put the food in your fridge, but you have to push the damn cart back and forth before you can even get it in the building.
utilities are «included» up to $ 25. it’s a SCAM. you will inevitably use more than $ 25 worth of utilities and have to pay the overage which can be as high as $ 125. most importantly, utilities are determined as a building as a whole, not by individual apartments. so even if you are conservative and turn off the AC when you’re gone, some careless person upstairs could leave it running all day and night and you will have to pay for that.
you don’t even get HD channels and the channels you do get are very basic. you have to pay to upgrade (of course). the Internet can be slow or not work at all sometimes.
the rooms aren’t even that big for how much you will pay.
management treats you like an idiot and often when I go down to the office to ask questions about leasing or subleasing or parking or maintenance or mail they are mostly clueless.
overall, I’ve found living at the view to be extremely aggravating. I could not wait to move out. I guess if you have lots of money you won’t mind living at University View, but if you’re like me and want to spend your money wisely, find ALTERNATIVE housing.

For what I’m paying I want them to know what’s wrong.
This is my mid year report to them. I’m not trying to be funny
I wish you would hire a cycle instructor. I don’t like that I don’t have the option to unlock the front door. I hear strange noises at night in my room. I do not like the location of the bus stop and the 117 bus is ridiculous. Especially with my night classes, no thank you I do not need a tour of College Park’s night life on my way home every night. I would also like if the retail spaces offered more than emptiness. I would love a supermarket, Panera Bread, or arcade even. The mail service is also a tad slow. I order mail that I pay extra for it to come overnight and it is mailbox size. I get it a week later at least. This has happened all three time I’ve ordered mail. I am also sad that a few people have access to the side door and I do not. Also recycling is a big hassle. I would also like an overhead light in my bedroom. I miss brightness. The window facing a giant building and bus stop is not the idea «view» I usually can’t even tell how the weather is from my room. I am also confused as to which direction our traffic circle goes. It would have been truly innovative if you had build a recycling shoot next to the garbage shoot. Also when I moved in the dishwasher was broken. It took months, calling every single day to get someone on that. Literally months. A lot of the things you have you only have to tell people you have like the Ethernet connections [doesn’t work for me, it works for my roommate’s rooms but not mine, but after the dishwasher experience it just isn’t worth the huge hassle.] also the pool is only 3 feet deep. Also the elevators are very crowded at certain times, but for some reason, which I do not know. The stairs to my floor are locked. My new years resolution was to take the stairs instead of the elevator, but that’s impossible. Please unlock the stairs. Also the utilities are delivered to my mailbox after they are due, making it a little hard for me to pay them on time. The light switch to the room with my sink in it is located in a very inconvenient spot. Also the medicine cabinet’s magnet to make it close falls off. I also wish I could at least rotate the bed, but it doesn’t fit between the walls. I’m not strong enough to open the windows. I am very far away from my very early class next semester. We will see how that goes. The vending machines are over prices. Lower prices on chocolate would make me happy. Our shower has problems draining and my roommate is unhappy that the door to the sinks blocks her bedroom. The carpet gives me rug burn and I do not like that we have an electric stove. The desk/​dinning room chairs «designed for students» are silly and also a tad scary. In addition to not being strong enough to open the windows, I am also not tall enough to get into my bed. I have created a dangerous step system out of boxes to climb onto that thing. Also, I am incapable of separating the dressers as advertised. The dinning room is also in an unfortunate spot. No one goes in there, but I do know for a fact that the living room furniture all fits in the dinning room, but all four mattresses do not fit well in the living room. The way the toilette flushing button looks confuses my guests and sometimes they just give up and don’t flush, then I don’t like them anymore.

One-​sentence review: The pool they boast about is three feet deep. Expect everything else to be the same.
Now, for my longer review. University View was part of the reason I came to the University of Maryland. Once I was placed 800-​something on the waiting list for on-​campus housing (don’t you love how they treat transfers?), I knew I needed to find a place. The View seemed perfect. Newly-​built, it was the closest to campus I could possibly find.
My lust did not turn to love. Part of this review is due simply to the horrible nature of real estate dominated by college kids. But a management’s handling of the situation is everything. And the tenancy will always help define your view of a place.
The tenants are awful. While acts of destruction seem to be a staple of apartment housing in College Park, the destructiveness here was ridiculous. The management’s response was worse. Both ineffectual and largely intrusive, the management resorted to vague threats while also installing video cameras in the hallways; broken lights continued to adorn the hallway walls anyway.
The management also took to a bizarre policy of only letting people in – including my parents — by taking their ID. Half the time, when you came back down, the security guard disappeared and you had to hunt them down. While I appreciate security measures, I appreciate a trust from my management even more; trust goes both ways, folks. They even took the absurd step of locking the side entrance after 10 PM, the side upon which I either came from my parked car or on my bike. Great.
Many of the tenants also had some strange superiority to their attitudes. It was inhabited by kids with little self-​respect, who seemed to think much was owed to them. One symbolic memory I have was watching a kid try — and fail — to get his Hummer inside the garage. No doubt he tried to sue the place.
The apartment itself was nothing special. Small and already furnished, I knew of little else to compare it to. Looking back, the prices were outrageous for what I got. And it turns out, if you’re not in engineering, math, or physics, you’re about as far as you could be from the majority of your classes.
All of this culminated in my final, horrendous day at the View. It was the beginning of August, 2006. I went down to the main office to figure out who my new roommate would be (my last one — an awesome guy — graduated in May). Instead, they informed that my room was now a girl’s room. «What!?» Yes, I was supposed to have vacated my apartment the day before. They had no new lease from me.
Now, this was back in the days before I learned to take absolute control of the more important material aspects of my life. My dad, bless his heart, had simply not noticed the new lease in his mail, and it was never signed or returned.
Sadly, University View gave me, the tenant, no notice of this whatsoever. It did make sense to send the lease to the co-​signer. And my dad was somewhat to blame for this mix-​up, and I have since learned to follow up more. But there is no excuse for the way in which I was not notified — not once — that they had not received a new lease, and that I was to vacate the apartment.
This left me scrambling to move out in the course of less than 12 hours. While the staff downstairs was courteous, I found myself visited by the Regional Manager a few hours into my hurried rush of packing. The bitch (there’s no better word for her actions) immediately yelled at me to vacate. Obviously uninformed and unwilling to risk becoming informed, she continued to yell until I finally ordered her out of my apartment.
A year of living there, summed up in a single day. I can easily say I’m glad I’m gone. What seemed like an honest attempt on the View’s part to gentrify College Park has devolved into another crap apartment, but with a façade of attractiveness.