Parking

March 15th, 2007 4:10 PM

I wanted to write this down in case Google should send anyone considering living at Graduate Hills and Gardens my way. These are the graduate apartments owned by the University of Maryland and operated by the (evil) Southern Management Corporation.

There was no parking last night. The resident spaces were full, the guest lot was full, and the street parking was full. I drove around for half an hour before finding a spot on the street about half a mile away from my apartment. Conveniently there’s nothing about parking in the SMC leases, but this seems like an issue that they should care about. Yet they clearly give out more permits than they have spaces, and the lots filling up happens all the time.

Something that brought a smile to my face a few weeks back was this: the management at Graduate Gardens sent an email to all tenants offering a referral fee to anyone who could help fill a couple of empty apartments. Unfortunately, they seem not to know about the BCC field in an email, and so the email went out to everyone with hundreds of addresses in the To field. Someone (who is awesome) decided to leverage this mistake to turn the address list into a guerrilla mailing list, and to suggest to everyone that no more apartments be rented until the parking situation was resolved. Of course there was no response from the management, but I liked the idea of using their ineptitude against them.

Comments

If that doesn’t scare away prospective car-owning tenants, I don’t know what will.

Permit refund…??

Posted by: Kabir on March 15th, 2007 7:50 PM

Sadly, there’s no permit charge to refund. It’s all tied up in the same outrageously high monthly rental fee.

Posted by: kasei on March 15th, 2007 8:01 PM