Apartment Review for Jefferson Commons - Columbus, OH

I lived at Jefferson Commons (now known as The Commons on Kinnear) from August 2004 to July 2006. I was in a 3bedroom/2bathroom apartment of which I paid $535/month in rent. The bedroom size is extremely small. Maybe 7ft by 9ft at best. The whole place is pretty loud although so was I on a few nights. You can hear the people living above you constantly moving about. What people have stated about the pool area is true. There will be parties and sometimes "other things" going on in the pool area until 4 or so in the morning. Sometimes a resident manager will notice and go down and throw them out but sometimes this goes w/o anything. The parking garage is a deathtrap. People will go speeding through it at 30-40mph and I've seen 2-3 accidents occur in there from people trying to take a turn too fast. When I lived there multiple cars were broken into on the roof. The management was lazy about fixing mirrors in the parking garage that are used to see if any cars are coming. A few would fall or be stolen and they would just let it go. The hallways are always in pretty bad shape. A lot of people like to leave their trash lying around instead of walking to the parking garage and throwing it into the dumpster. Maintenance can be pretty slow about fixing issues. Our AC broke one month in the summer and we had to go w/o AC for a few weeks while they waited on some part to come in. Finally, after three weeks of waiting they installed a window unit to give us some cool air and then took longer to get the part in. The issue of parking has been addressed. Parking in the garage costs $20/month extra on top of your monthly rent and sometimes finding a space can be pretty difficult. The parking gate is constantly snapped off and was never in operation any longer than the first 2 months that I lived there. While the towing service employed by them does a pretty good job of getting cars out of there that aren't supposed to be in there it is still a hassle to find a spot sometimes. There is no real visitor parking. For now there is a little bit since the business across the street appears to have shut down and it looks like people have been parking there lately but visitor passes can be rented at $5 or $10 a night I forget the price or if it's gone up now. During my 2nd year here management switched all the doors to keycard access which wasn't a bad thing. The big issue though is when you would come home with a car full of groceries or something and find that the lock had been updated or changed and have to go to the office or check your mailbox to see if you received an updated keycard without any warning which happened once or twice maybe for security measures I don't know. The office staff while I was there were always rather incompetent. They never really cared to answer too many questions. All mail packages are handled through the office and my friend, on multiple occurences, had a package delivered that was stated as delivered through the tracking log and upon asking the office for it they would claim they didn't have the package and my friend would check back over 5 days and still nothing and then magically one day it would appear where "they thought they had looked". I've come to decide that they are rather lazy and don't look through all the packages. If it doesn't jump out at them they just let it go. All in all this place isn't the worst you can do but for paying $525 a month in rent ($545 if you include parking) you can find a much better place in the general area that is much nicer than here. You're basically paying a premium on location since it sits right on the west campus parking lot.