SIGNING LEASE:
When signing the lease for the apartments there was a rent reduction that was going to be in place. This was a separate addendum on a separate piece of paper. However, on the main lease there was a line where addendums to the lease (Addendum A, Addendum B, etc) were listed. This list contained all addendums EXCEPT the one about the deal I was getting on the rent. I added it to the list by hand before signing. The man who was in charge of the leasing did not know what he was doing. When I was instructed to sign a paper acknowledging that there could be lead in the apartment paint, it was hard to distinguish whether lead had been found or whether lead could possibly be found and hadnt yet. When they were showing me the apartments, they didnt show me the apartment I would be leasing, but showed me a sample apartment that was in good repair and had an excellent view of Green Mountain. When I actually moved in it was a different story.

MOVING IN:
I got to move in 2 days AFTER the lease start date. The carpet had just been shampooed so I could not put any of my belongings on the carpet. I had to place my belongings inside the kitchen area. The kitchen cabinets are wood with white paint. In places there was no paint and I was told that they would send maintenance later to finish painting the wood. I had to sleep at a friends house that night because the carpet was wet, giving a total of 3 nights I couldnt sleep in my own apartment after my lease period had started. Maintenance came while the carpet was still wet and my belongings were still on the counter. They placed some paper here and there to guard my stuff and then proceeded to use white spray-paint to fill in the spots on the kitchen cabinets. The paint flecks got all over my belongings because insufficient precaution had been taken. I had been told that my apartment would be facing downtown. (aka. nice view) It was, but all I had a view of was the parking lot and the next apartment building across the way.

POOL:
I was told that the pool would be closing in October (I moved in mid-September 2002) and reopening once the winter was up. During the closing the pool would be redone with French doors, etc. Instead of opening in spring, the pool reopened in June, months behind schedule.

MAINTENANCE:

Toilet:
The toilet in my bathroom would not flush everything down the toilet. It would take several flushes to get even the most basic stuff down. After I called maintenance to fix the toilet several times (each time they also took out my tidy-bowl tablets so I had to buy new ones) Then they finally told me that the toilet was as old as the apartments (30 years old) and that it wouldnt flush properly with the tablets in it. They told me that as they received reports about each toilet that they would replace each one with a newer model. They said they would order a new toilet for me. It took over a month for it to get in and installed.

Leak #1:
I came home from work (I worked till midnight) one night to hear water spraying inside the hallway wall. The wall where the sound was coming from looked damp and the carpet near the wall had a square foot of wet area next to the wall. Directly below this was the boiler room, which had water dripping onto the carpet from the doorframe. I called the management office, which had a number for emergency maintenance. I called the maintenance number, which connected me with a call management center that said they would contact maintenance. In the meantime I went back to the hallway to check on the wall. The wall plaster was softening. Within a half hour the spraying pipe had softened the plaster sufficiently to make a hole in the wall, which it was spraying out of. I called maintenance number again to tell them the new development. The answering service was quite cordial and said they would let maintenance know. I placed a bucket supported by a cardboard box next to the leak to catch the water and minimize damage. I emptied it a couple times and watched for maintenance to come. By 2am I called the maintenance answering service again who said that he had heard back from maintenance that that they were just going to get to it in the morning. At that point I removed my bucket and cardboard and went to bed. There was a stream coming out of the wall like what would come out of a garden hose with a sprayer attachment. It was shooting diagonally across the hall for a distance of approximately 6 feet and last I checked had soaked approximately 30 square feet of carpet.

Water Turn Offs:
I came home on a Saturday in April 2003 at 11pm to see a note attached to the front door of my building. It was from the on-call-maintenance asking us to quit paging him and that he would turn the water back on tomorrow. He was working on it. I looked around the building and didnt see a maintenance worker or the carts that they drive around the parking lots anywhere. He went home to get some sleep and enjoy a good dinner at home and left us with no running water.

There have been other multiple times when maintenance has turned off the water to my building without notice, though it is for routine maintenance. I have more than once been stuck unable to get ready for work at 3pm because the water has been turned off and they hope that nobody notices because most people are not home.

Electricity:
There have been multiple times when the electrical plugs in my apartment have had a power outage. Once it happened right after we had just bought all our groceries. Xcel said the outage should only last an hour, so we didnt buy ice to help the food, and went to work. When I came home it appeared the power had just come back on an hour ago and all the food was ruined. The next time it happened and Xcel said the same thing we bought ice for our food but the power came back on after a hour. Eventually, after around 4 outages, Xcel figured out the problem and there hasnt been one since.

Leak #2 & Lost key:
I came home one day to find a note on my door from maintenance that stated that they did not have a key to my apartment and that there was a leak in my apartment that was dripping down to the countertops of the 1st floor apartment bathroom. They asked if I could stop by tomorrow and lend my key to management so they could make themselves a copy. When I brought my key to management they said that oh yes, thats the one that got lost, and made themselves a copy. I then asked them what was going on and they said that the 1st floor (Im on the 2nd floor) had complained several times about the water leaking into their bathroom and since the first floor was being so vocal about their complaining they had no choice but to do something about it. (Im thinking, so if they hadnt kept complaining what would have happened' And.. What stranger has a key to my apartment now that youve lost it') They said that they needed to knock out my bathroom wall to get to the leaky pipe. This was 1 week before my wedding, and my apartment was where all the bridesmaids were supposed to be meeting beforehand to get ready. I told them that I couldnt have them working in my bathroom right before the wedding. They said they had to, so they would get it done early in the week. They did but they left a mess of plaster and whatnot all over my bathroom that I had to clean up (oh, and they figured out that it was coming from the 4th floor and not my apartment.)

Wedding Gifts:
Management lets you sign to allow them to hold packages for you. I had clearly told the management that I was getting married (see above), but we came back from the honeymoon to find a note on the door (after a 1 week honeymoon, not that long) that if we didnt come to the management office to retrieve our packages immediately that they would send them back to the sender. (It had a date of 2 days ago.)

Flooring in Kitchen:
The same leak as #2 caused the underside of the kitchen floor to stay damp, which made the linoleum tiles on top of it bubble and warp and the glue to become unstuck. They replaced the tiles in June of 2003 but it is now happening again July of 2004.

Garbage Disposal:
The underneath of the sink was always damp and we couldnt figure out why until the very minor leak coming from the garbage disposal finally turned major when it started spurting water at us. We made a maintenance request and they put putty over the hole, which eventually fell off, when they finally replaced the disposal (After living there 20 months).

Front door:
Part of the reason I rented at these apartments is that you need 2 keys: 1 to get into the building itself, and one to get to the apartment door. This extra security measure was something I desired. However the lock on the door would keep breaking. It would be shut but making the noise it makes when someone is getting buzzed in. One night it kept buzzing all night, and as my apartment is right next to the door, you could hear it when trying to get to sleep in the bedroom. After this the lock was taken out by maintenance. It stayed out for months. I asked them when they were going to put another lock back in (this is building 32) and they said that the residents kept breaking the lock. She said that the number of residents that did not want a lock and were continuously breaking the lock equaled the number of people living in the building that wanted one. She said that the doors and lock system were old and that it was very hard to find replacements for the parts and the owners of the building were not willing to pay for it. She said if I really wanted extra security that I was allowed to install, at my own expense, my own chain mechanism on the inside of my apartment front door. I noticed that most of the other buildings still have locking outer doors, but ours does not. Also, its been over a year since they took the lock out of the door, so I dont think that they are ever going to fix it, despite the fact that they advertise their security doors in the apartment guide books and the vandalizing residents (if it even was residents, and what good are locks if you can break them that easily') are probably gone.

A/C and heating:
The instructions for the air conditioner tell you not to put it on high or it will freeze up. Unfortunately, if you put it on anything, it will work great for an hour or two and then freeze up. Once it freezes up there is nothing you can do but wait and cook. The other great thing about the air conditioning is that the air from it gets nowhere near the bedroom. The air conditioner is attached to the main room and will cool the main room, but to get to the bedroom the cool air has to travel down a small corridor and then around another corner to get in the bedroom door. All in all it would have to travel in a complicated U-shaped path. Even with the help of fans to route the cool air along to the bedroom, the bedroom is still cooking even if the main room is freezing (in the time before the air conditioning seizes up, that is.) Also it is an old air conditioner that doesnt work very economically, so just from using the thing in August and sleeping on the living room floor, my electricity bill shot from around $20 a month to $70. Part of the problem with the apartment is also that there is no way the apartment will keep cool without air conditioning. All the windows are on the same wall, so even if you open a window to let in some of the night air, and use a fan, there is nowhere for the warm air to leave through, so it doesnt work. Somehow the apartment functions as a thermos. As an experiment, in winter, I turned off the heater completely while it was snowing outside. I really didnt get that cold, except for my bare feet. It might have something to do with the apartment being 1 floor up and across from the boiler room, but you cant be sure.

Snow:
There have been several times that our parking lot has been the only place in the neighborhood that hasnt been plowed after a good snow. I have walked through slush at 11am to get to my car when nowhere else has any snow on the roads. This lack of plowing also leads to a disproportionate number of icy spots in the parking lot that could have been avoided if the snow were plowed in the first place.

Shower:
One day in my shower the tile underneath the little metal handle thingy came out from the wall, and there was nothing underneath it but spider web type stuff and a big hole. Whatever the shower tile had been attached to had disintegrated. I let management know and they did a work order for maintenance but I never heard back. One day I saw a maintenance worker on the stairs and asked him about it. He said that they would have to redo my entire shower wall and it was taking a while to get the parts. A month later I found him and asked him again, and he reported that their account with the place they needed to order the boarding from was in trouble so they had put a hold on their orders. He said that they should get it worked out by the end of the week. A month later they finally let me know that they were ready to redo the shower wall. They didnt redo the whole shower wall, but knocked out the bottom portion and put in a dividing line of brown tile and then non-matching tile underneath the line because they were too cheap to do the whole thing. I went months with a hole in my shower wall while showering, its a little disconcerting.

All in all, I think that the apartment management reached the lowest point during my first year of renting (September 2002 September 2003). We stayed put because we were just married and didnt have the time or money to find another apartment or take care of moving expenses. Also, I was looking for a new job and didnt know what city it would be in, so it made no sense to move and then end up being the opposite end of the metro area than I needed to be for my new job. The majority of things went wrong during the first year of renting, while the second year things improved, and, it seems as though the whole property management staff has been replaced. Perhaps they are working to improve things, but its a slow process.

Also, as a general interest, before renewing the lease, I did give management a hard time over all the issues that had arisen during my first year. Their main response that the building was old and that such things were expected to happen in a building that age. There was nothing wrong with my apartment; it was just bad luck that so many things happened to occur in just my apartment. Hmmmm.

The location, however, is great. If you hike up Holman way you can get to Green Mountain Park, which has loads of hills, grass, and wildflowers. You can hike up the hills for a workout or around the base of the mountain for a nice stroll. Its really great. Also nearby is the new Colorado Mills mall and Denver West shopping area. The only downside is that the closest real supermarket (if you dont count SuperTarget at the Mills) is down Golden road past a low security correctional center of sorts. Its at the intersection of several major freeways, so its usually pretty easy to get around. 6th avenue hasnt really had much construction on it since recently (past month). Im not sure when its supposed to be completed.

I dont have many complaints about the laundry room. If you want your jeans to dry completely you need to put in an extra quarter. Also the middle dryer should be avoided, it doesnt work too well. They took out the soda vending machines in the laundry room. It looked like someone attempting to get free product had vandalized them with a blowtorch. The other buildings probably have soda machines though because they have locks on the building doors.

When I moved out, to be fair, I left some damages to the apartment. I had some bleach stains on the carpet, had broken a knob off the bathroom storage space, and the blinds for the sliding door to the balcony would no longer open and shut. I never heard back from the cliffs concerning my deposit, but I assume since the refundable part would only have been approximately $75 anyways, without those repairs, that it has probably gone to repairing my damages and do not hold it against them.

User Responses
From: redbeer1	Date: 05/02/2006
When I moved out, to be fair, I left some damages to the apartment. This is why Properties are really in despair residents move in break stuff and then move out who do you think has to pay for that??? The deposits never cover the full amount of the damage you know that you didn???t pay a 1st & last months deposit so you had nothing to lose I bet if you had it would have been spotless with no problems at all from the start but they knew what kind of resident you were going to be!!! Typical!! Bye the way: Packages are a courtesy not a requirement of Management you should have read your addendums before you signed them!
From: SuezzieUCSB	Date: 08/22/2007
Most apartment damages are due to normal wear and tear from living in an apartment. Even people living in their own houses, which they are the owners of, have blinds that break and knobs that come off. Really the only bad thing I did to the apartment was the bleach spots. You had my new address. You seem to think the damage I caused was beyond that of regular wear and tear and not covered by the deposit. In that case you should have assessed the real cost and billed me for it. If I then had refused to pay, you could call me a "typical" crappy resident that breaks things. Seeing as you never tried to do so, your comment holds no water, and it's a wonder you stay in business at all. If you extend someone a courtesy, it is bad form to revoke it when they have come to expect it, especially leaving threatening messages concerning it. It would have been better not to extend the courtesy at all so I could have given the registry the address of my in-laws house to send the presents too. I tried to be fair with my review, stating both good and bad about the apartment, and said I had no problem with them keeping the deposit. I had said that things were getting better. Your response is inflammatory, rude, and unexpected. Still not professional at all.

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