A Review of The Club at Eagle's Pointe Apartments
6033 Lake Club Ct.
Columbus, OH 43232
(Posted on http://www.apartmentratings.com)

I have lived at the Club at Eagle's Pointe for just over a year now and will soon be moving into a new house.

What originally attracted me to the place was the interesting building architecture and the location, being quite convenient to I-70 and I-270. It seemed to be about the same price range as any other apartment and the office personnel appeared to be fairly professional.

The design of the buildings is such that all of the apartments open into a central porch. The result of this is that some people in each building tend to think of the central area as their living room in the warmer months. I don't see anything wrong with sitting out and having a beer or two on the porch on a nice day, but this arrangement results in constantly having to wade through groups of drunken strangers when coming or going after dark. The odds are that with eight apartments opening into the same location, you're bound to have a set or two of neighbors that are the type to party every night. You can usually tell how much fun they had by the number of beer bottles on the porch from the night before. However, one thing I do give credit to management for - they sometimes come around on golf carts in the morning to pick up stray bottles.

The apartments are nice enough, but the buildings are aging and this results in many problems that the management is less than helpful in addressing. I don't know whether they just don't employ enough maintenance personnel or whether they're just lazy. I'll assume the latter. One noticeable thing about my apartment in particular, which is on the second floor, is that the building has settled and warped unevenly such that the floor is very concave in the dining area and one of the screen doors doesn't close all the way. The cabinets, countertops, and fixtures are also very worn and have been outdated for 20 years or so. At least they work, though.

In the winter they make absolutely no effort to clear the parking lots. No plowing, no salt, no sand, no shoveling, nothing, no matter how bad the snowfall.

They're also very lazy about having broken-down, abandoned vehicles removed. I believe a vehicle has to sit in the parking lot with expired tags and a flat tire for about two months before anything is done about it. Luckily there are plenty of parking spaces. About a quarter of the cars in the parking lot are missing a window and have the classy garbage-bag-and-duct-tape look that's all the rage these days. I don't know whether these windows were broken in this parking lot, but they sure add nicely to the ambience.

For slightly longer than the last month there has been a smashed couch, a pile of rubble, some broken glass, a dented-up air conditioner, and some tree branches sitting in the parking lot. There is also a section of the building next door that is covered over with a sheet of plywood. I can only assume that someone drove through the wall of the apartment. I'm sure the pile of debris will probably be cleaned up in a month or two, but it does give it that nice homey warzone feeling.

In April there was a gas leak. We were without heat or hot water for just over a week while the gas company replaced the gas lines and meters. The ground was torn up and the place looked like it had been bombed. Once the work was completed no effort was made to re-seed, and the once-nice grass front of the apartments is nothing but an ugly conglomeration of piles of mud and stones.

In May there was a leaking water main and the water was shut off for two days while it was repaired. This was right after the cable had been shut off for a week because the cable junction box to this building was mislabeled and my cable was disconnected when someone else had their service disconnected. The cable company had an astonishingly hard time figuring out this problem, and though it's probably not the apartment complex's fault, it's just one more thing to keep in mind regarding the quality of life here.

So far, in June, the power has gone off for at least a few seconds every day - just long enough to have to constantly reset anything that has a digital clock. If you're going to live here make sure your alarm clocks have a battery backup.

Although they have lamps in front of the building, both lamps in front of this building have bulbs burnt out. It makes for a nice creepy "I'm going to get murdered by a crackhead hiding behind a tree" feeling when one goes out to get a book from the car at 10pm.

Mind you, I don't hear gunfire here or see shell casings strewn about (maybe maintenance collects those when they come around for the bottles), but there does tend to be a lot of domestic-type screaming and fighting that goes on at around 2am. If I leave the windows open I can hear the raging-alcoholic neighbors vomiting in the backyard at least once a day. The trees are nice, but all that hurl is going to kill them sooner or later.

As I write this the temperature reads 92 degrees in my apartment. I put in an A/C repair request a week and a half ago and nothing has been done yet. The average temperature for the last week has been 90 degrees with 80%+ relative humidity. There has been just enough rainfall to keep it incredibly muggy. My daily call to the office has been meet with an apology, bullshit excuses, and no results. I'm sure I'll have mold and mildew problems soon. Everything I own that is made of paper has already started to warp.

I had signed for a one-year lease. That ended last month and since I am buying a home soon I decided to go month-to-month. I find on my invoice (yes, they do send a monthly invoice, which is nice to have despite the fact that they're too stupid to make the yearly totals add up properly) that they decided to arbitrarily charge a $75 month-to-month lease surcharge that was not stipulated or agreed to in any contract, nor was it ever mentioned to me at any point before being charged. I knew that they did charge higher rents on short-term (3, 6, or 9-month) leases, although nobody in the office can come up with the same numbers for each lease if asked. I can't imagine that such a practice is legal and to me it amounts to none other than a form of extortion. It will be contested.

This has easily been the worst place I have ever lived. It is standing proof that small-time landlords are not the only ones that can be slumlords. If you like living in the ghetto, this is the place for you.

- Xangis