GT Housing Review: Crecine Apartments
During my third year at Georgia Tech I stayed in the Hemphill Avenue Apartments (renamed Crecine Apartments in 2008)
The GT Housing website offers this information about Hemphill:
| Location | West Campus |
| Avg Room Size | 91 sq. ft |
| Gender | co-ed by suite |
| Floors / # of Rooms | 5 / 322 |
| Furniture | Hemphill features apartment style space (individual rooms with two residents sharing a complete bathroom). All residents of the apartment share a living room and kitchen. |
| Lounge | There are lounges on each floor featuring chair. The third floor lounge has a TV. |
The Hemphill Avenue Apartments main attraction, like all of the other campus apartments, is the individual rooms. My roommates and I got Suite 214, which had 4 mini-bedrooms (90 sq feet), 2 bathrooms, a kitchen and living room area.
The living area is not as large as it appears in my diagram.
Here is the living area as seen from the kitchen. I'm not sure who was sleeping in the living room.
I was in room D. From here the bathroom is on the left, room C on the right.
I had a bit of a poker theme going.
There was no space to put my printer, so I had to prop it up here against the wall.
I was expecting Hemphill to be perfect for me. This year I would be working part time in addition to taking 15 hours of classes, which meant getting to bed early in order to be up by 6. I didn't think this would be a problem, since I had a separate room. Unfortunately, the Georgia Tech housing website did not mention "paper thin walls" as one of the amenities on their website. You can hear everything from the rest of your suite as well as those neighboring your own. It sometimes seemed like the room acted as a sound funnel, making even relatively quiet noises sound like they were coming from within the room.
The noise issue was a problem throughout the year, but it not the only one I encountered:
Georgia Tech Housing Staff
I try to deal with GT Housing as little as possible, but we had problems throughout the year that required their "assistance."
- It took a week, many online requests, and several calls and emails to the Housing office just to get the furniture that was supposed to be a standard part of the room. The housing office did not seem be keeping track of their own furniture and usually just said that they couldn't replace broken items because they didn't know if there were any spares.
- Our bathroom sink leaked all year. It rotted and warped the wood around the sink so we tried to get someone to fix it. While we were waiting it got worse. We had one week where it got so bad that we had a pool of water sitting on the carpet in front of the bathroom. Despite submitting multiple maintenance requests with notes like "Help! Our room is flooded and we may fall through the floor!" it took nearly two weeks to get anyone out to help. When they did arrive, they replaced the rotted wood and vacuumed the water off the floor. They made no attempt to fix the leak, and it continued to damage the area for the rest of the year.
- When you need anything adjusted or repaired in your room you must submit an online maintenance request. GT Housing will not confirm that they are sending anyone to help, and you can not schedule appointments. I needed a desk replaced, so I put in a request and called the Housing office. They said that when someone arrives, they would not fulfill the request if there was anything on my current desk. Fair enough, but could I at least get an estimate of what day someone might show up? No. Instead, I had to pile everything onto my bed every morning for a week, hoping each day that someone would show up to help.
Poor Building Construction & Maintenance
- Leaks from above- I only witnessed one of these, but heard about others from my roommates. The fire alarm went off after midnight one day, so we evacuated. While we were waiting for the alarm to be shut off, we heard some people from the fourth floor (we were on two) saying that they think the pipe burst in their room may have set off the alarm. Sure enough, that's what happened, and when we returned to our room we found water running down the walls and bubbling the ceiling. We called the emergency housing hotline, but didn't get help until almost 5 am. During the wait, we started looking around and noticed that their was evidence of previous water leaks all over the apartment.
- There were many days when I woke up to find no hot water. Most of these were during the winter, so taking a shower was not much fun. It was usually fixed within 6 hours, but was a major inconvenience when trying to get ready for work or class.
- There were two elevators, but I never saw more than one operating at a time. This wasn't a big problem since I was on the second floor, but it was annoying on move in/out days.
- The locks for the outside doors were frequently broken. I realize that this can happen anywhere, but it shouldn't take weeks to repair.
My experience at Hemphill has made me decide to part ways with GT Housing. They seem to have no desire to provide anything more than a room and key. The school has so many freshmen, who are guaranteed housing, that they probably don't mind if returning students opt to move off campus. I believe that this is the reason for the poor service.
Living on campus my first year was a good decision. While the housing was pretty bad, I think the benefits of being on campus for freshman year make it worthwhile. Second year was a toss up, anything more than that is just asking for trouble. GT Housing is very affordable when compared with anywhere else in Midtown, but the quality and service is pretty poor. I would recommend staying on campus for either 1 or 2 years to new students, but I would advise against choosing Hemphill.