UTSA Chapparal Village

I stayed in Chaparral Village for the 2006 – 2007 semester so this review will reflect that.
When I moved in Chaparral Village had just finished being constructed and it was a beautiful place to live. The alternative was University Oaks or Chisholm Hall which were both noticeably aged and had their fair share of maintenance issues from what I had heard.
Your UTSA ID was used for your room key which was pretty cool, the units were furnished with the basics and the furniture was actually of nice quality. It was like upscale IKEA furniture.
Our bathroom was kind of awkward in the sense that I had been placed in a handicapped unit so there was not bath tub — your shower pretty much was in the far right side of the bathroom and the toilet the opposite and it was completely open otherwise. You share this and a single sink with a roommate on the same side of the unit as you (this was a 4-​bedroom setup). I guess I know what jail feels like now.
Maintenance-​wise we only had a few issues: there was one instance where my roommate (on my side of the unit) froze over the AC unit because he liked it freezing at night practically, so they were pulling whole blocks of ice out of the AC unit. And when it rained the water had leaked all the way down from the top floor thru my room and it was leaking thru the smoke detector which caused the alarms for our building to go off. The maintenance people, in their infinite wisdom came over and they decided to bandaid the issue by just removing the smoke detectors for the night. Come to find out the water was dripping on the wiring and causing the smoke detectors to smoke hence the alarms and they almost deep fried me in my sleep.
You have community buildings (also accessed via student ID) that have communal washers and dryers. There’s also entertainment there and they are a great place to study. They DO charge for washer/​dryer usage though, so when you equate in meal plans (which are required here too) it’s cheaper to live off-​campus in most cases. If you aren’t going to have a car, then that’s another story. I enjoyed being able to walk to class daily and the cafeteria up by Chaparral usually had pretty good food.
CAUTION! If you are bringing your own car here, parking gets really bad on the weekends and at night as people get home from work and be very careful as campus police are all over the place and they give out speeding tickets like they’re candy.