Village Green Apartments Community Center and Rental Office — Local services in Town of Van Buren

We wanted to love living here but each year this complex has gotten worse and worse.

Our rent is now $1510 a month with all the fees and rent increases.

Every year we have lived here, they have taken something away from the residents. It started with taking away our grills. Now they have removed our bushes and trees.

When we called to ask the reasoning they said it was because of the animals getting into the buildings (The animals climb the siding of the building not the tree. It's upper branches weren't strong enough so that's a poor excuse). However, they didn't even trim or take care of the trees/bushes on the property. In the three years we have been here, they never trimmed the trees/bushes. Instead they ripped out everything with less than 12 hours notice. Our neighbors had no idea it was happening until they came home and everything was gone from their patio. They haven't fixed any of the broken siding or holes in the foundation though.

Maintenance isn't bad but they used to be better. They hardly clean the common areas. Same spider webs have been in the hallways for months. When we moved in, we had to ask them to fix the paint and even had to clean everything ourselves since they didn't do so between renters.

Snow removal is terrible. They take forever to clean the parking lots and pathways. They say it's because they have so many parking lots. Maybe they should just hire more people? It's noon right now and we haven't had the parking lot cleared. I have had to shovel and salt our walkway on several occasions for safety.

Hot water takes 5-10 minutes to warm up unless you leave the kitchen sink running hot even in the summer (you have to run it all winter so the pipes don't burst).

Apartment airflow is bad. You almost have to get a window AC since the only unit is in the living room and doesn't spread to the rest of the apartment.

The second floor gets a "balcony". It's a small strip of spiked metal than you can't fully stand on unless you are incredibly skinny and need to wear shoes.

Rent has gone up $40-100 every year we have been here. It seemed reasonable at first but then they started taking things away and the maintenance/cleanliness off the complex has deteriorated but the price kept climbing.

We really loved living here at first. It's just been so disappointing recently.

Edited after the apartment company responded: Lowered to 1 star from 2. I did call and talk to the office on multiple occasions with little to no help, especially with this new development. They told me I could put up a fence. I live on the second floor. When I pointed that out they just said sorry and there was no intentions of landscaping/planting to be redone. Now we have a pile of rocks and tree roots. It's a giant mud pool when it rains. The apartments look depressing without any form of plant life around the buildings. I honestly hate coming home now and I truly used to love this apartment.

2nd edit (added photos): Removing the trees/bushes did nothing to stop the wildlife. We still have squirrels playing on our screen door. In fact, it's happening more this year since they don't have a tree to play in now. We always loved seeing them in the trees. Now it's just a bit closer and the cats are excited. The real problem is that birds have begun roosting on the edge of the building since they have nowhere else to go. There is bird poop all over the buildings, cars,...

Short version: Worst apartment experience in my life. Bad first impression, incompetent office and maintenance staff, even worse corporate management, stay far away from Village Green and Dawn Homes.

Long version: After a 17 hour drive, they moved me into the wrong apartment. Was given the option by Samantha (property manager) to get refund or move in, 15 minutes after finding out... while having no where to go if we don't move in. We decided to move in. We talked to management about getting the apartment we thought we were getting. We had family and website confirmation. They ended up moving us to the right one two months later, but talk about a first impression.

2 months after move in we find a dead mouse on the bathroom floor. Blood coming out of it's mouth. They claimed it wasn't an emergency on a Saturday and I had to wait. No one ever came and when I called they were super lax fully expecting it to still be in my bathroom after 2 days. They were supposed to come out and plug any holes and promised to do it the next day. I called corporate to complain and got a call from Samantha the next day to apologize and scold me for not demanding someone come out. I shouldn't have to push and anyone should know a possibly poisoned or worse rat is an emergency.

After all that, I tried to transfer early to another sister property and Dawn Homes claimed I didn't meet the criteria. They made a lot of excuses, claimed NY state law and criteria changes but I got into a more expensive apartment with no problem. I'm used to excuses with this company but after all the issues, they couldn't even move me somewhere else, was pretty sad.

Besides these complaints, we had a yellow jacket infestation, paper thin walls where you can hear everyone's hallway conversations or their kids race up and down the stairs, awful airflow in the apartment where it's 80 degrees in your bedroom but 60 in the living room because of the wall AC not distributing cool air anywhere, a "balcony" where if you weigh over 160 pounds you can't even go on it (you also have to wear shoes because they designed it to be very uncomfortable to stand on barefoot), and an apartment outdated and cheaply designed … Sadly, I...

The people that are rating this place higher than a 3 star are paid robots. The whole year I was living there, there was nothing but problems. First, they said any unknown car would be towed, which they never would even though there was no parking to begin with. Then they decided to put electric car chargers, that the ONE electric car did not use, and made MY patio area a mud pit. They CONSTANTLY tried to get into my apartment for “inspections” but when I looked at my cameras I had they never even showed up. I had plenty of maintenance issues that needed to be resolved, including our blinds on our sliding glass door and our fan in our bathroom, which they never fixed and/or waited wayyyy too long and told me I was crazy. Since our fan didn’t work I had to clean mold off the walls constantly just so I could get my security deposit back. And our blinds kept falling without warning and hitting my dogs in the head and us. They didn’t want to fix it until it fell on their head and we forced them to fix it. Then, I had to wait almost 2 months to receive any little bit of my security deposit back because they sent the notice through mail and they wrote down the wrong address. They even sent me an email asking about the forwarding address and still sent it to a different address and decided to wait 3 weeks to let me know the mail was sent back. They even let my neighbor throw a 30 person party after hours (after many noise complaints to the cops) and let their dog bark for HOURS including in the middle of the night. There was so much wrong with living here and do not advise anyone spend their money here. Why would you want to spend money on a place that doesn’t even have a property manager and hasn’t for...