Apartment Review for Cameron Greens - Austin, TX

When I moved in, I was paying $457.50/month with Internet and cable included. Utilities were separate, but I thought this was still a pretty good deal for a large one bedroom apartment. When I first came to see the apartments, they told me they were remodelling, and that for the moment there was no air conditioning but it should be working before I moved in. They lied. For the first month I lived here (in summer), there was no air conditiong. There were also numerous times when I went without electricity. More than once they gave us notices the day before or the day of that there would be no water between the hours of roughly noun and five. The landscaping that they told me would be finished when I moved in seems to have been adandoned, so there are still just empty gravel areas throughout the complex. The apartment hadn't been lived in for a while, and aparently they didn't bother sending in pest control when no one lived there. I had serious bug problems in the beginning. I opened the pantry door and three roaches fell on me. Roaches lived under my sink and in my dishwasher. All kinds of other bugs were in the cabinets and bathroom. The hook up for the phone in the kitchen was broken and they didn't bother to fix it, just moved my phone into the living room. Whoever painted did a shoddy job, as there are obvious lumps in the paint, including a huge, thick dripped chunk of paint on my bedroom door. The light in the kitchen is full of dead bugs. The disposal in the kitchen was full of old food which kept coming up every time I tried to use it or ran the dishwasher. I had the handyman come look at more than once, but it still doesn't always work very well. My refrigerator had to be replaced because it was leaking some kind of brown liquid. I am going to grad school in Washington in the fall, and class doesn't start until September. As a result, I asked if I could stay until the end of August, four months after my lease expires. It turns out that in order to do this I must now pay $535/month, as well as lose my free Internet and phone. I agreed because I can't move for just four months. After I discussed this with someone in the apartment office, I was told that I didn't need to sign any papers, just to start paying $535 after April. Later that same woman called my mother and told her I needed to come in and talk to them since I hadn't gotten back to them about the letters on my door concerning signing a new lease. My mother told her I'd already spoken to them, and she looked through some papers and said, "Oh, you're right. She spoke to me, actually." They called my mother a second time recently. They told her I had only paid $500 instead of the $535 I owe for rent. I looked in my checkbook and at my online banking statement. The check I wrote them was for $535 and the check was cashed for that amount. When I came in and spoke to someone, she made a copy from my checkbook and told me she'd get back to me. She never did, so I went in and spoke to the apartment manager. I was told that I had been misinformed. I still owed $35, which was a "month to month fee" in addition to the already increased price of $535/month. I said, "So I'm really paying $570 a month?" The manager said, "You're paying $535 plus a $35 fee." "So I should be writing checks for $570 every month?" "Yes." Apparently this fee is usually $50, but I got a student discount. They never mentioned this fee when I talked to them about staying here longer. In other words, DO NOT LIVE HERE.