The Park On Center

The Parking Sucks

I’ve lived at Park on Center for three years now, so I can give an informed review stating clearly why I won’t be back after my lease is up.
First, the pros: The landscaping is excellent and the apartments are pet-​friendly. My husband and I have a two-​bedroom here, and the space is adequate for our needs. The balconies are nice for gardening and there’s plenty of space for dogs to run around while on a walk. The complex is right next to a grocery store, the post office and the Interstate, and close to UNO.
The cons, unfortunately, outnumber the pros. We’ve lived here three years, and each year has been worse than the last. The biggest issue for us is that our apartment is falling apart. In the last year, we’ve had all kinds of maintenance issues: our shower head exploded while I was taking a shower (it was scary!), during the Polar Vortex last winter our windows were sheathed with ice on the INSIDE due to improper sealing (which also drives up our AC bill in the summer, with all the cold air leaking out), our AC was out for almost three weeks in June, our door was splitting so bad the doorknob fell out twice (once after a bad repair job) so the door wouldn’t close enough to be locked with the deadbolt, the sliding doors in our closets keep breaking and jamming, and the dryer in our building was broken for about two weeks, spewing out hot air into the hallways and condensing water along the walls. The staff are very slow to get work orders done and require multiple visits or phone calls to the office unless you get mean about it so they take you seriously. So maintenance is a huge issue here.
Then, there’s the neighborhood. My husband’s car has been broken into twice here, and for awhile we had cops at the complex at least twice a month. People would have screaming matches or loud parties at odd hours, and when other residents complain, the office did nothing about it. One of my neighbors smashed beer bottles and coffee mugs on the sidewalk, and make the hallways reek with marijuana, and they still haven’t been dealt with even though other people in the building have complained about them. The parking here is terrible, too. They have a towing company come in every night to pick up unauthorized vehicles, and they towed our newly-​leased car the night we got it because the office had closed before we could get a new parking sticker, and all the visitor stalls were full. They got us half-​off the price of the tow, but it was still $ 93.50. The staff at the towing company said they tow at least six cars a week here.
Finally, the staff is the last big problem. In the three years we’ve lived here, the staff has changed three times, and they keep getting worse. When we tried to talk to the staff about how we thought it was unfair that they had towed us despite us living here, they got very short with us even though we were polite. They don’t call when they say they will, lie about when attempts to contact them were made (for example, they said my husband didn’t give them a chance to call him back because he called in the morning, but his phone log placed his call at 1 in the afternoon), are dismissive of resident problems, and make no attempt to show residents that they care about the facility. They say they do walk-​arounds to make sure there aren’t problems, but it’s clear they don’t; a junked car was sitting in a prime parking spot for three months, and I had to go into the office twice for them to arrange to have it removed.
I used to love living here, but it’s gone downhill so fast I can’t believe we have to suffer through nine more months of this. Don’t be fooled into staying here — the benefits are only skin-​deep.