Houston Apartment Recommendations

I live at Lofts at the Ballpark, which is downtown. I love it -- the rent is reasonable, and the apartment is really nice. I used to live at the Houston House (also downtown). I do not recommend it at all.

 

What's your upper price limit(number) for reasonable price?

 

A 25 minute commute could be almost at the beltway... I live in midtown, love it here, but a crappy 1 bed will run you about a grand.

 

Depends on what you think is reasonable. I live near midtown (W. Alabama) in a 2 bed-2 bath 4-plex.

$995 month.

 

Find an apartment locator. The apartments pay them- you don't have to pay them a dime. Most apartments pay locator fees so you won't have to worry about missing some great place because the locator is leaving the apts off the list due to no fees.

 

Sq. Ft. and rent?

Please anyone giving recommendations give size and cost.

 

What did you not like about Houston House?

 

Try www.apartmentratings.com

It has a pretty comprehensive list, but I've found the reviews aren't very accurate. But it's good place to start.

We need to know your price range though. It really varies a lot. Med Center is pretty cheap. Midtown and Washington a lot more expensive.

 

There are some good ones in that price range in the Med Center (off Almeda). I used to live in that area and know people who do and like it. Very close to everything.

 

When I first moved there, it was really great -- an old, but nice enough apartment with a fantastic view at a great price. It was nice having garage parking, having a dishwasher (I never had one up north), new carpet, etc. I really liked it for a good six months. It had quirks during that time, but they were minor.

Then about six months in, something changed. All of the sudden, I started getting roaches. Everywhere. All the time. Here's the thing -- I didn't really keep any food in the apartment . . . I wasn't there most of the time. My neighbors didn't change either. The simple fact is -- that building has a potentially unsolvable roach problem. They are everywhere. I'd read about this before, and knew that it was an issue people had before I moved in, but I figured it was overblown. Absolutely not . . . they came from everywhere. The apartment would come "spray", but that didn't do anything (I don't believe they actually spray anything -- many residents have told me they thought the same thing). I tried everything I could to get rid of them -- mostly, they'd come from the vents, so I actually put up a mesh screen in front of them, which worked pretty well, but they found other ways. On many occasions, I'd walked down the hall and seen roaches in the hallway, and I'll never forget the day I came home and a roach was crawling across my front door . . .

But somehow, that didn't bother me to the point of moving. I was prepared to stick around indefinitely -- for $800, I had a cool apartment with a great view, and my utilities were paid for. It was bad, but I always thought I could get ahead of the roaches somehow, and that would be the only problem. I was wrong.

The roaches were bad, but what got even more grating than that was the constant breakdowns of things. The elevators were almost constantly broken. Usually of the 3 (plus a service elevator), one was always out, and sometimes two. My dishwasher stopped working, and despite repeated inquiries to the management / maintenance, it never was fixed. They'd come by, and give me notes like that I'd loaded the dishes wrong, or that the drain was clogged, or some BS excuse like that. Here's the thing -- it had nothing to do with any of that -- no water came out of the dishwasher's spinning arm. I could've run it with NO dishes, and the same thing would've happened. They clearly had never actually checked to fix it, they just gave me some lame excuse and moved on. I eventually gave up, and we just used the dishwasher as a drying rack.

Perhaps the most fun event was one night when I woke up and it was really, really hot in the apartment -- this was in the summer, mind you. I wasn't sure what was wrong -- I got up and felt the vents, and they were blasting hot air. I tried fiddling with the controls, and that did nothing. I opened the sliding door to the balcony, and it was significantly cooler outside. The next morning we were talking about it in the elevator -- turns out it was a building-wide thing. Three days later, it was fixed. Three days of blasting heat in the apartment during the summer (you're not supposed to turn off the fan -- as per the lady who rented me the apartment -- eventually I did though), and then inexplicably one day it started working again. No notice from the apartment about it until after it was fixed. Almost the EXACT same thing happened in November last year -- but then it was out for more than a week, and the management was not very forthright about it with the residents.

I could literally complain for another 5 paragraphs about all the things that happened over the 15 months I lived there. The thing is, I'm not demanding at all. I'm usually not a complainer. I've never really had a bad thing to say about anywhere I've lived. But the Houston House is a different story. One of the best memories I have of that place is moving out.

Oh, also my wife's car got broken into -- we'd only been married a few weeks, and her window was smashed in the parking garage. We told the security guard downstairs and he pretty much just said "okay". That was it.