So I have been living at Highgate for 2 years now (I moved in January of 2007- end of December 2008), but will be moving out at the end of the month. I'm not leaving because of a problem, but because I'm moving across the country.

I thought that the size and price of the apartment was an excellent value and that the other complexes in West Chester left something to be desired.

I never had any issues with neighbors or management, nor did I ever have to call maintenance to fix anything during the whole two years.

Now, with all that said, I'll be realistic and admit that not everything was perfect. The water pipes are very noisy, and you can always hear when the people around you are taking a shower. My shower made an awful hissing sound, but I learned to deal with it.

The next problem was that rent was raised each year, as I would have expected, but nothing was ever done to improve the apartments. As soon as I moved in they paved over the pool and closed it, and last summer (2007) they told us they were going to re-pave the driveway. However it rained on the day they were going to do so, and they never rescheduled it. It just made me wonder why it was necessary to charge more rent if they weren't using any of the money on the property. I was a bit upset by this. Don't raise prices if you aren't offering more benefits, right'

Another issue I tended to have was with parking. There is plenty of parking on the property, but there never seemed to be enough parking spots in front of the buildings for everyone who lived there. This was probably made worse by the rude people who insisted on parking both of their cars in front of their apartment instead of thinking of others and parking one car down the hill. There was also a woman with a handicapped spot right in front of her apartment, which she apparently "needed" but every time I saw her she was walking around just fine. Its just annoying because if you had to run out after 5 p.m. you could almost be assured that your spot would not be there when you got back. I think this issue would have been resolved if there had been assigned spots, but since the management doesn't have to park there, I guess it didn't matter much to them.

Next thing: Not really a big issue for me, since I'm a 25 year old guy, but I did notice the trash area was very dark at night and there was very little lighting. I was never aware of anything happening to anyone, but if I were a single woman, I probably wouldn't have been very happy about it.

The last issue isn't really Highgate's fault, but if you live in the front of the complex you will have to deal with the noise from the traffic on route 3 and the fire alarm that the firehouse sounds to call the firemen out. Eventually I was able to ignore the fire call, but it was noisy, and during the summer, with windows open, it was pretty impossible to ignore.

So those are my gripes, but I still feel like the positives outweighed the negatives. I would definitely have stayed for another year if I were staying in the area, but like I said, I do have to move out. I realize that I did a fair amount of bashing, but in all honesty, you're going to have problems no matter where, and since the issues weren't really that major, I think that its a good choice. I'd take the issues I had over break ins, insects/ mice, and noisy college kids.

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