Apartment Review for Tiffany House Apartments - Oklahoma City, OK

My wife and I moved into the Tiffany House apartments in July of 2005. We signed a one-year lease because it was cheaper. It's now January '06, and as soon as we have the money, we're going to break a lease for the first time in our lives. Not a moment too soon.

It started, literally, the instant we moved in. Even though they had more than a month to prepare our apartment, they told us our apartment wouldn't be ready till after 5pm. This was on a Friday. So we go rent our U-Haul and head over there at 5:30pm. Here's what we discovered:

- The fridge and the stove were in the middle of the living room.

- The toilet was unhooked and in the bathtub.

- There was no tile in the kitchen or bathroom, just bare concrete.

- The blinds and the towel rack were broken.

- All manner of tools and supplies were strewn everywhere.

- All the maintenance and office people were gone for the weekend.

It was obvious that even though whatever crew they had to prepare the apartment knew that someone was moving into it that day, they just dropped whatever they were doing at 5pm on Friday and got the heck out of Dodge. Even though it wasn't even CLOSE to done. We should've seen that this was a sign.

We called the emergency maintenance line, and about two HOURS later the lone on-call maintenance man called us back and said that he couldn't do anything about it until the next morning. All he did the next day was hook the toilet back up and push the fridge and stove back into place and picked up the tools. It wasn't until Tuesday that anyone came to finish laying down the tile or cleaning the place up. When they did lay the tile, they did it all wrong, because the carpet had already been laid down.

So the tile in our bathroom comes up over the carpet instead of under it like it's supposed to, and in neither the kitchen nor the bathroom is there any sort of mat or anything under the tile -- just linoleum on concrete, and lumpy at that.

Their compensation for this? A refund on our half our first month's rent. We discovered a few weeks later (while reading the Gazette) that they had been advertising a special that offered half the first month's rent off to EVERYONE, and they hadn't even offered it to us in the first place. So for our trouble we just got the discount we should've gotten in the first place.

The blinds and towel rack are broken to this day. I have notified them three times of this, twice in writing.

When we moved in six months ago, we were told that the insane construction and "renovations" on the entire building would be done "very soon", perhaps by the end of the month. Little did we know that by "done" they meant "we're going to tear it all up and just leave it like that".

The pool - a concrete hole surrounded by unconnected pipes and raw dirt.

The hallways on EVERY floor - gutted, uncarpeted, bare concrete, with broken tile, half-stripped wallpaper, and crumbling ceilings.

The "exercise room" - a half-dozen ancient machines, ALL broken.

Come look at the place. No need to make an appointment, the "secure entry" is a joke, you can just walk right in whenever you want. Come look at the place and realize that it has been exactly like this for over six months. There hasn't even been the tiniest improvement, what they have changed (I.E. painting over the aging metal and faux-wood paneling in the elevators with incredibly sloppy solid white paint) has made it worse.

As far as I can tell, there are only like two maintenance people working there, for a twelve story building that's completely gutted and supposedly remodeling. It's been months since I have seen anything resembling anyone remodeling anything. It would actually be comforting if there were supplies piled everywhere and hammers and saws going all day, because that would mean they're DOING SOMETHING.

They told me there was on-site security when we moved in, but I have never seen any security guard, even patrolling the parking lot, since we moved in. So who's monitoring those fancy cameras in the hallways for trouble? Nobody.

The ghetto trash they've started renting the place out to has now developed the habit of throwing beer bottles off the balcony. This means the parking lot is covered with broken glass (which no one ever sweeps up), and yesterday I noticed that my car has developed a brand new dent on top of the hood in a place another car couldn't have possibly done. Coincidence? You make the call.

A few weeks ago, a note from the office even appeared taped to the inside wall of the elevator, notifying us of a number to call "in case of any problems with the elevators". NOT A GOOD SIGN!

The WORST part, for me:

Because it is "all bills paid", the entire building is on the same giant heating and air-conditioning system. Every apartment has a thermostat, but apparently they can only run the heater OR the air-conditioner for the whole building. And they can't just switch back and forth on a daily basis as the weather changes, or so they say. So this means that, for no good reason (I.E. to save money) they turned off the air-conditioner in SEPTEMBER, when it was still well over 90 degrees outside. And they said they couldn't turn them back on until the Spring. As you Okies know, the weather wasn't below 70 degrees on average until mid-December, and we've had about two weeks total of weather that required a heater thus far this winter. So that was three very uncomfortable months with no air-conditioning, and also, unless you wanted actual HEAT blowing into your apartment at all times, no air-flow whatsoever, because there are no fans or "vent" settings.

We had a problem with a leak coming down through our bathroom ceiling from the apartment above us right above our toilet, resulting in our bathroom ceiling sagging and the paint peeling off. The first time the leak happened, a maintenance guy came, went upstairs (I assume), stopped the leak, and said he'd come back and fix the rest of it later. He never did, and we never heard anything, but the leak came back. Eventually, my wife left a very angry voicemail on the emergency maintenance line, and they two maintenance men finally stopped the leak for good. They cut a big square out of our bathroom ceiling where the leak had come through, and we could see that *black* mold had developed inside the ceiling. They left the moldy hole open, saying that they had to let it dry for a "couple" of days, and then they'd be back to fix it. On a Monday three weeks later, literally, a guy came to plaster the hole back up. He half-finished the job (didn't repaint it) and said he'd be back "Thursday" to finish it. That was almost two weeks ago.

We discovered him fixing this when we came back from the store and found our apartment door wide open and the guy in our apartment. Alone. Oh yeah, the concept of a "24 hour notice" is something they tell you about when you're signing your lease at Tiffany House, but after that, you'd never know they had such a policy.

I truly have no idea how this place stays in business, or even, in a supposedly just world, how the people who run it stay out of jail. I don't know exactly, but there even appears to have been three or four different owners and/or management teams just since we moved in.

I'm not even all that picky. I work at a hotel, and so I would be more than understanding of how crazy things get sometimes. Even after the mess when we moved in, I had faith and believed them that things would be better. Six months later, they're either the same or worse. This isn't disorganization -- it's apathy, contempt, dishonesty, and incompetence. Apart from the decent neighborhood and the lack of any overt crimes, Tiffany House is absolutely, positively, ghetto. It's worse than ghetto. At least Section 8 housing has standards of some kind.

It just makes me angry to be cheated and lied to, and so I want whoever reads this to avoid that same fate.