Apartment Review for Meadow Creek - Boulder, CO

When they showed me some of the apartments, I was impressed. Rent was low for such nice-looking places that were also pet-friendly. When I said I wanted to lease, suddenly I was stuck in the back of the building in a dark, crummy-looking place. The layout was even slightly different from the one I was shown. The management was applying high-pressure tactics to get me to lease this particularly ugly unit. Moving in under these circumstances was a big "oops." I don't think they seriously inspected this unit at all before I moved in. The fridge, dishwasher, and A/C were all broken (the A/C was broken in more than one way!). The A/C leaked on the inside of the closet, causing water damage to the wall--and it must have been leaking off and on for a while before, since there was some awful mold growing behind the A/C unit. It took weeks of repeated pestering to get anything replaced or repaired. The only time I ever got PROMPT service was when I had two emergencies--both water back-ups from the sinks, resulting from the carelessness of upstairs neighbors. Maintenance responded promptly for those incidents. For normal calls, the call was directed through the office, and several calls were needed to get a visit from maintenance. I think this was the office's fault more than the maintenance workers'. The workers were always polite and fast when they did come in to fix or replace something. Neighbors are often careless and inconsiderate. They don't care if their actions cause clogs in the connected plumbing and cause flooding in ground-floor apartments. They will let their young, noisy children run around shouting all day, and at night they will sit out on their balcony or patio chatting loudly until 1AM or later. These people always sound like they're standing right beside your window. The walls are paper thin. If someone has a dog or kids in your building, you'll hear them, even if it's a few units down. Frankly I find the dogs a lot quieter than kids for the most part. The dogs aren't running around like elephants upstairs. Frankly I feel like I'm being charged too much for the kind of place I'm living in here. It's cheap for Boulder, seems to be okay for families with kids, but if you're a single person renting a cheaper unit, expect to be ignored by management until you learn their maintenance policy (if they ignore your maintenance call, you are supposed to be refunded the rent from the time you called until the time they schedule service for you). After I learned this policy there was little left to be fixed, BUT what did need to be fixed was done promptly. On a positive note, the area seems fairly safe. I have not noticed any crimes happening, although I have seen some people kind of loitering around some of the parking areas. It made me very nervous when the outside lights were off these last few days--I've taken to leaving my apartment's outdoor light on as a result.