My overall review: meh.

Specifically, the buildings were built in the 1970s, and little has been done to update them. You can expect 30-year-old vinyl linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom, a 30-year-old air conditioner that will struggle to cool down even one room (and you will need air conditioning during the 90 to 100 degree days in the summer), older appliances, 30-year-old fixtures, and the very bare minimum of everything.

The kitchen counters and cabinets have been sprayed with a rubbery light-colored paint-like substance in a half-assed attempt to "upgrade" these original items. This coating will slowly degrade and will peel away in places, revealing the nasty dark wood below.

The carpet is that peculiar shade of "cheap apartment brown" with very low nap that will become compressed in a very short period of time. Be sure you are willing to talk with the front office on a weekly basis to get even the most basic of service for the carpet. They offer to clean your carpets once a year when you renew your lease, but if you don't ride their asses, they simply won't do it.

The heat in these units is electric baseboard, and ours leaked one winter. We called maintenance to come out and they stopped the leak, but were reluctant to dry the carpet with a wet-vac or otherwise clean the standing water out of the carpet and padding to prevent mold from growing. We insisted and they finally complied (this is typical: be sure you're willing to be very clear about what you want done and that you expect it to be done in a reasonable time frame, otherwise they will neglect you).

The bathrooms are, quite honestly, an embarrassment. The tub and toilet are in one very tiny closet-like space. Honestly, the door just barely clears the front of the toilet seat and rests about 2 inches from the tub when you open or close the door. The vanity and sink are outside this area, much like a super-8 hotel or other budget hotel. The two bedroom apartments have only the one bathroom, so be prepared for some interesting situations if you ever have friends over or out-of-town guests. Also, taking a shower presents an ever-present risk as the water can instantaneously change to either scalding hot or freezing cold without warning if anyone in any other unit so much as flushes a toilet. Our building has 16 apartments, so you literally never know what you are going to get.

The laundry facilities are a joke. It's now $1.25 a load to wash and $1.00 to dry...but you also pay all the water, electricity, and gas with your utilities, so these prices seem crazy to me (at a coin-op you pay about the same, but the price includes the water, gas, and electricity the owners have to pay monthly). Be sure to have plenty of quarters, because there's no change machine on the premises. In addition: the washers don't really clean and the drier doesn't really dry. You'll wind up with wet, soapy clothes from the washer and damp items from the drier. In order to dry anything properly, you'll need to spend about $1.50 a load and will have to set the drier to "blazes of hell" (the other setting being "barely warm"). The 2 washers in our building (for 16 apartments) routinely puts tiny holes in everything. I guess you could drive across town to the coin-op to do laundry for nearly the same cost, but that's not the point. The point is that they advertise laundry facilities and they suck.

This leads me to the paper-thin quality of the walls. You should pray for quiet neighbors, because you will be hearing every little noise from their apartment that they make (sex, arguments, pets, flushing, disposal, you name it). My current neighbor below me likes to blast his stereo at top volume from 9am to midnight 7 days a week. It shakes my apartment when the bass is up. He's kind enough to turn it down when we ask, but this type of situation gets old very quickly. Other neighbors like to peel-out in our parking lot at 3am. It's like a drag strip outside. How these characters manage to not hit any of the dozens of unattended children screaming and playing in the parking lot at all hours of the night is beyond me. You'd better like hearing kids scream and cry a lot if you live here, because they are everywhere.

In the past year we've had to call 911 for one arson and 2 domestic disturbances, all involving neighbors that live in direct proximity to my apartment. One unsupervised kid set the dumpster on fire when it was filled with discarded Christmas trees. The flames shot over 12 feet in the air and the fire department was dispatched to keep it from spreading to nearby cars. The other calls were made due to some gem of a fellow who liked to beat the crap out of his girlfriend in the parking lot. I've seen more men hitting women in the highlander parking lots than I care to, one even involving a pregnant woman. We've had to make more statements to police than I ever thought I would have to in my entire life, and I grew up in Chicago.

The staff will literally rent apartments to anyone, which led to a situation where we had six 18-year-old meth users and their drove of high school admirers living in the apartment below and across the hall from us. The party never stopped with these guys, and the cops were there every weekend for the 6 months or so they lived there. They puked from the stairwells, they yelled to each other from the parking lot to their apartment, they had friends over at 4am who would blast their car stereos, peel out, and fight each other in meth rages in the middle of the night. Which reminds me: ask the Broomfield police about the highlander. They are always there for some shady person. There have been drug busts, violence, theft, vandalism, and in the summer of 2000 (before I moved here) there was a crack-and-prostitution ring being run out of the pool area after hours. Go ahead, google it for laughs. It's always classy at the highlander, let me tell you.

In short: yes, the rent is cheap and my apartment was both clean and reasonably maintained when I moved in. At that time, any apartment of comparable size in the Denver-Boulder area would have been close to $1,000 a month (frankly out of my budget at the time), and the highlander seemed like a steal. On the other hand, if you buy cheap you get cheap. This is low income housing, which has its own pitfalls and drawbacks, including the level of crime, substance use, and police presence.

Now that my income has increased, I will be moving out of the ghetto and into a complex that is more in-line with my needs and wants. If you can't afford anything else, give the highlander a look. If you can afford something nicer but are wondering what the difference might be between a $700 a month apartment and a $900 a month apartment, please see above.

User Responses
From: scared1327	Date: 08/13/2009
I can't believe I read the entire thing it was so hilarious.

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