The District

As an out-of-stater, I was lost looking for an apartment for 1L year in BR. I was somewhat cost-conscious and ended up at a fine place in a not-so-nice area about 15 minutes from the law center.

The District, where I am now (2L), is closer and has everything you need to live comfortably and get to and from classes with ease. Although utilities, water, and wifi you will have to pay out-of-pocket, the District offers just about everything else you could want. Covered parking, gated (safe), modern kitchen amenities, W/D in unit, good-sized gym, large outside pool and lounge, etc.

The District is a good place to live. It recently had some pretty terrible management, but it seems to be getting better with the new management.

This place has very nice apartments with good amenities, including a pool, public outdoor grills, gym, parking garage, and Amazon Hub locker inside the apartment complex to keep all of your packages (not just those from Amazon) secure. The downside is that management is slow with maintenance requests, the hub locker is semi-frequently down so you may have to wait a bit (usually not more than a few hours though) to be able to access your packages.

Good location but expensive rent

The District has gone through 3 rounds of management in the last 1.5 years we've lived here. It's right on Perkins so it's relatively centrally located to LSU, the Mall, restaurants, grocery stores, etc. There is a lot of green space for dogs to walk on, and 2 gated areas to let your dog off-leash. The floor-plans have a lot of sqft but layouts can be funky and waste space. Storage is also deceiving and less than expected, but its enough. There are no cameras on property, but we do have a curtesy officer, who will respond to calls. However, they don't respond to anything domestic.

The apartment is very nice. 950 square feet, a balcony over-looking the pool, etc. Comes with access to a small but decent gym, study rooms, pool, grills, and two very small "dog parks" (which are really just fenced off grassy areas with doggybags nearby). There is an Amazon Hub locker at the complex, so you get a text message when your package is delivered and it is held securely until you come to get it, which is amazing. All packages, not only amazon packages, are delivered here if they fit. Every 3 months, pest control people will spray around the inside of your apartment. 5 nights a week someone will come to pick up trash placed in a bin outside your door. There is a large parking garage, but no elevators.

The inside of the apartment is quite beautiful. Pendant lights over the kitchen bar, and directional "studio" lights in the main kitchen area. Plenty of storage space as well. Essentially the inside of the apartment feels like a luxury apartment.

However the management is very very slow to respond unless they have to. If it's something that is kind of a you problem, they might take months to respond, if at all. If it is clearly their responsibility, they tend to respond quickly however. The management is not very pleasant either. In fact they don't seem to be very good. In fact, they forgot to add me to the lease agreement, and nearly had my roommate sign a lease agreement without me which would effectively make it not my apartment. We are still waiting for them to respond with a fix to get my name in their system. How do you lose track of the existence of one of your residents? It seems like the place would've been fantastic when it was built less than a decade ago, but poor management probably made it a less appealing location. In fact, the grills did not work for nearly a year, and at one point I guess a resident did something they shouldn't have in the pool area which caused them to make the pool "by appointment only". So you would have to go talk to them to request access to the pool at a certain time, but I don't know if I'm going to want to go down to the pool at 5pm next Tuesday. I only know if I want to go now or not. This lasted a couple of months until eventually people just started going again. Btw, the pool only gets up to like 4 or 5 ft deep max which is pretty lame.

The management is so bad that we arrived to our new apartment with a toilet clogged with clean toilet paper, a disgusting trash bin with rotten banana slices in the bottom for the trash valet service (you'd think they'd clean it) and the washing machine screams sounds of grinding metal when you use it. You pretty much don't want to be nearby when you wash clothes.

So the hub locker is nice, the apartment is beautiful, and the complex is in a great location right on Perkins, 5 minutes from Perkins Rowe and about 10-15 minutes from LSU campus. The only thing about this apartment that is bad is the management, and they are pretty bad. And the lack of elevators could be an issue for some. I live on the 3rd floor and it hasn't been a problem for me except when moving furniture.

That said, it is way better than other places I've lived around LSU campus, both on and off-campus. I would definitely recommend the district apartments to others with a disclaimer that management is poor.

The apartment is small but comfortable, and the management is usually responsive. It may be a bit pricy for what we're getting, but I feel safe and I think the location is great. It's very easy to clean and the closet is big. It also has a washer and dryer! The mail system is organized and secure, and the main building has some great social spaces. The parking garage has levels to match the apartments, so you never have to carry groceries upstairs.

Our apartment is on the second floor and we have a balcony onto a courtyard. The opposite wall of the courtyard is the parking garage. This makes for a very noisy time--we hear every muscle car and truck that goes through the garage, every 2am car alarm, and every time the dogs in the apartment above us get excited it sounds like a small horse race. From the courtyard, we can hear whenever a neighbor talks on their balcony, and whenever one dog barks.... allll the dogs bark. Because of this, I would highly recommend choosing an apartment that faces the exterior instead of the interior, which I believe would be much quieter.

In terms of the apartment and its amenities, it is good. There is a gym, pool, and Amazon Hub for package pick up. My main issue lies with the pricing and marketing of the complex. They advertise themselves as a luxury apartment complex, however, they have no video security surveillance on the property and sometimes maintenance can take a while to contact and address issues. It's really the small things too that get to me; for example, our clicker for the entry gate was starting to intermittently stop working so we brought it to the office, and instead of replacing the batteries or the clicker itself they opened it to have us take a picture of the battery so we can replace it ourselves. I just feel like for the price we pay that little things like that should be taken care of for us. At this point, while the apartment and amenities are good and well, it just doesn't seem to be worth the price since it doesn't feel all that luxurious. If their rates were lower and their marketing weren't luxury-focused I would likely have a different opinion.