Cliffs at 6th Avenue (JRK Residential Group) Run-down, poorly maintained apartment complex with uncooperative staff Golden Colorado

I’ve lived in a lot of awful apartment complexes all across the Denver area. I’ve lived in places that ranged from very high-end apartments where you could expect to be nickel and dimed to death on every minor little scheme they had going, to apartments that came close to qualifying as a slum, where there was regular criminal activity and you feared for your property (and possibly even your life) every time you came home from work. However, as far as places where severe maintenance issues were unresolved and the incompetent staff experienced constant turnover, the Cliffs at 6^th Avenue really takes the top spot.

When I moved into the cliffs, I wouldn’t have excepted any problems at first glance. The leasing office was clean and apparently well-maintained. There was a small gym with brand new equipment on the other side of a set of windows from the office. The property manager, Daffney Skinner, showed me the “show” apartment on the second floor of that same building, which seemed very nice. I brought up the fact that I had read some negative reviews of the apartments on the internet, but she dismissed the complaints as falsehoods and expressed anger that people were “lying” about her. (She is going to love this review!)

After moving in, it didn’t take long to discover the truth. My apartment was nothing like the “show” apartment. It had old cabinets, old appliances and the place looked like it had been repainted dozens of times with caking paint flaking off the walls. The heating was old baseboard heat, with rusty parts that were literally falling off the walls. The deck looked downright dangerous, with rotting boards that had large gaps in between them. The toilet had a permanent ring around the water level in the bowl, which I would have sworn looked like the barnacles growing on the hull of a ship.

But the apartment itself was at least livable. The real problem was with the rest of the property, which was practically a disaster area. The building at the front of the property where the leasing office is located is very carefully maintained. The landscaping which is visible from the street is also carefully maintained, with several brand new signs that have been recently installed, fancy lighting pointed at these signs and even gardens of beautiful flowers. Behind this front line of beautification, the rest of the property is a wreck. Overgrown bushes, dead trees, dying grass, mud holes, flooded terrain, random debris scattered around, overflowing dumpsters and many other problems plague the outdoor areas of the property. The interior of the buildings isn’t much better, with broken doors, poorly maintained laundry rooms and obvious damage to the hallways.

Although located in a quiet and respectable area of Golden, this place looks and is run like an inner city slum. Crime is relatively low in this area of the city, but this apartment complex is probably the local blight and the source of all the crime which does exist in the area. Most of the residents here are low-class sleaze-balls, who constantly smoke marijuana and make the whole place smell like a hippy commune. Strange cars are often parked in the parking lots and it isn’t uncommon to find homeless people trying to live in the parking lots. Still, the office staff finds excuses to tow the cars of people who legitimately live here, while ignoring ones that are actually a problem.

The most outrageous problems with this place can really only be fully discussed by breaking them down into major sections.

The Pool

Most of the buildings on this property look run-down, shabby and have severe maintenance issues. None of them are worse than the pool building. The recent “improvements” to the pool building also reveal the mindset of the property management, which attempts to very literally “paint over” issues rather than actually fix them.

During the two years I lived here, the pool was closed more often than it was open. Even when it was open, the water was usually so cold that swimming for more than a few minutes was a potential health risk. Whenever Daffney Skinner was confronted about these issues, she would become argumentative with residents and brush off their complaints. If asked why the pool was closed, the answer was usually that “a part is on order” or that they needed to “clean” the pool. The pool was always filthy, so their idea of “cleaning” is was to dump more chemicals in. That pool spent more time “waiting on parts” than the parts department at a car dealership. In response to the water being cold, Daffney would blame her maintenance staff, saying that they intentionally turn the heat off because it requires less maintenance that way.

Of course, I’m not denying that there were maintenance issues with the pool. That much was obvious. The pool was nasty and freezing cold, with a heater that was either turned off or clearly didn’t work. The pool was located indoors in a building that was probably the ugliest on the entire property. From a distance, the large metal stacks on the roof and the decaying architecture made it look like an old crematorium. Inside, there were broken doors, exposed wiring and padlocks on all the exterior doors (to keep people out, since the building was usually closed anyway).

Usually several times a year the pool would need to be totally drained and refilled. Supposedly this was to “fix” something or to “clean” the pool. Of course, it never got any cleaner or any better maintained. The process of draining to pool did help to wreck the rest of the property, since the procedure was to simply pump the water straight out the doors of the pool building and into the grass. A large section of the property would basically become flooded whenever this was done. On at least one occasion that I witnessed, the pool itself actually started to overflow and the water surged out all sides of the pool building to flood the property even more severely than when the pool was drained. Not surprisingly, the area flooded around the pool had serious mud holes and dying grass.

Finally, the apartment complex made an effort to “renovate” the pool building. Their effort was literally a campaign to cover up the problems with the pool to avoid fixing them. They closed the pool for several months while construction workers (likely illegal immigrants) made loud noises from very early in the morning to early in the afternoon. When the process was finished, the pool was still dirty, cold, frequently closed and. But the “renovation” had replaced the sliding glass doors with roll-up garage doors and a new sound system that plays awful music. A literal effort of “paint over” the problems.

Security Doors

One of the big reasons I selected this apartment complex was the promise of “secure” buildings. Having lived in some very sleazy apartments in the past and having been the victim of crime on several occasions, hearing that only residents could get into these buildings by having a key for the exterior doors was a big selling point for me. Unfortunately, these exterior doors are beyond worthless.

Firstly, you don’t even actually need a key to open the doors. Some kind of ancient intercom system that no longer works has been rewired to open the doors with the right code. Everyone knows this code. Pizza delivery, Chinese food delivery, etc. Residents will give out this code to anyone who asks. Apparently not Fedex or UPS though, since they still drop your packages at the office without even trying to deliver them to you directly.

More importantly though, the doors are often broken anyway. The magnetic locking mechanism at the top of the doors often breaks off, either dangling down too low to lock the door or simply coming off the door frame entirely. Other times the arm that pulls the door closed will be broken, preventing the door from closing fully enough to lock. I’ve even come home a few times to find the door entirely removed from the frame and missing! I suspect that some residents are intentionally sabotaging the doors because they are too lazy to carry a key or even punch in the code.

Even if the residents aren’t sabotaging the doors, they will shove rocks in them to prop them open if all else fails. I understand propping the door open when you are moving in or out, but people will prop the doors open and leave them that way all the time if nobody kicks the rocks out of the way. I kicked the rocks out of the way every time I came home or left, but would always find them propped open again the next time I came through the door. Why have a “secure” building if you are going to intentionally sabotage the primary security feature?

Hallways & Stairwells

Not just the doors, but virtually every other part of the building is also a wreck. It isn’t uncommon to find trash and old furniture in the stairwells. Emergency exit signs are usually broken and dangling from the ceilings. Ceiling tiles are often missing or have water stains on them. Plumbing issues seem to cause regular water damage to the building, meaning you will nearly always find holes torn in the drywall and water damaged areas in the hallways.

If it isn’t bad enough that residents trash the hallways, the maintenance staff seems to do it too. When broken-down old appliances are taken out of apartments, along with any other debris they remove, the maintenance staff apparently has a hard time figuring out what to do with it. For awhile they started stacking them in the storage locker room, effectively blocking residents from being able to access their storage lockers. Eventually one resident complained and began placing notes on the door of the storage locker room threatening a lawsuit if he wasn’t able to access his storage locker. The staff retaliated by moving all the appliances out into the hallway, so the storage lockers weren’t blocked, but the hallways were now full of trashed old appliances.

Speaking of the storage lockers, I never got to use mine because there was already a lock on it when I moved in. I asked the office to remove it and was told that was my responsibility. My responsibility to remove someone else’s lock from my storage locker? Yeah, apparently. Not that it mattered enough for me to fight them on it, since the lockers were so small that they were effectively worthless anyway. One of these lockers was about the same size as a small refrigerator.

Smoke Alarms

Much like the ancient intercom system that had been rewired to control the door locks, the buildings also had an ancient smoke alarm system. Every smoke alarm in the building was wired into it and there were all kinds of problems with this. One alarm goes off, the whole building goes off. With all the people smoking marijuana, you can guess how well that worked out.

Cooking inside the apartment was impossible. Any cooking would set off the alarm. You can’t take the alarm down, because it is wired into the system. At first, the procedure was to open the door to the patio, all the windows, turn on fan in the bathroom ceiling, and even set up several additional box fans to circulate fresh air. That worked about 50% of the time, allowing cooking in the apartment without setting off the alarm. You can imagine this wasn’t pleasant in a Colorado winter when it gets below freezing outside and you have to blow that into your apartment just to make a meal. Later, I figured out how to rubber band a plastic bag over the smoke alarm, which allowed cooking without the back doors and windows open, if I was careful. Generally, the best bet was to use both methods, doors and windows open, with a bag over the smoke detector.

One night, the alarm literally went off in the middle of the night while I was sleeping and wouldn’t stop. I had to leap out of bed, rearrange furniture to stand on, and reach up to put a pillow over the smoke alarm to get it to stop. As soon as I took the pillow down, the alarm would start again. There was no smoke, I wasn’t cooking anything. I had literally been in bed and asleep. I had to call maintenance to come and take down the smoke alarms in the middle of the night. They promised to come back and reinstall them later after they figured out what the problem was. Thankfully they failed to keep that promise just like all their other promises, since I didn’t want the alarms back and was actually able to live quietly without them for the rest of my last few months there.

Another night I came home to see West Metro Fire Department going into the building and the alarms blaring. One of the firemen was someone I happened to know and I stopped and chatted with him for a few minutes. The next day, Daffney Skinner lied to me and claimed that the fire alarms went off because of a glitch. That would have been a believable excuse, except for the fact that the firefighter I talked to had already told me that the alarms went off because another resident was smoking marijuana in their apartment. Why would Daffney lie about this? Smoking marijuana was against the lease agreement, but Daffney never wanted to deal with the extra work of kicking out residents who violate the agreement.

The “Dog Free” Building

Since we are on the subject of Daffney Skinner never enforcing the lease agreement, lets talk about dogs. My building was supposed to be a “dog free” building. According to the lease, no dogs of any breed, size or any sort were allowed under any circumstances. In practice, nearly everyone in the building had a dog. I don’t dislike dogs or begrudge people who own them. But I don’t own a dog and specifically asked for the dog-free building because I didn’t want to hear barking or deal with dogs in the hallways. Like the broken security doors, this was another promise that the apartment complex didn’t keep.

A lot of people, in the “dog free” building and elsewhere, simply kept their dogs hidden from the office staff. Since nobody in the office actually lived on property, all the people with dogs needed to do was wait until 5PM when the office staff went home. Then you would see dogs all over the property. This included people who had dogs in the “dog free” building, as well as people who had dog breeds that were banned in the lease agreement no matter what building you lived in. I regularly saw Dobermans, German Sheppards and even Mastiffs on the property in the evening. People would even let their dogs swim in the pool at night.

A few people in the “dog free” building had played the “service dog” card. If you have ever known a person who owns a “service dog” you know that most people lie about this, most so-called “service dogs” are just untrained mutts and that people will claim a “service dog” just to circumvent the rules about where dogs are allowed. That is a rant for another time, but suffice to say that even if people did have “service dogs” they should have been placed in a building where dogs were allowed and not in the “dog free” building. The apartment complex should not be offering a “dog free” building as an option when they already know there are dogs in there.

Parking

One thing I can give this apartment complex credit for is that there was usually plenty of parking available. However, the parking lots themselves were a mess, like the rest of the property. Oil stains, potholes, unplowed snow and overflowing dumpsters were constant elements of the parking lot. There were also dense bushes planted around the buildings and parking lots, which seemed to constantly absorb all kinds of trash and debris. Some of this might have been trash blowing onto the property, but there were also large items of debris that clearly had to get there through some method other than wind. These bushes were rarely trimmed and never cleaned.

About once a year, the apartment complex would “re-stripe” the parking lots. This means they would repaint all the parking stall lines on the asphalt. When this would happen, they would force all the tenants to move their cars out of the parking lot, leaving people with nowhere to park. If you didn’t move your car, you would get towed. These parking lot fiascos were often announced on short notice and I’m sure there were plenty of people who were out of town or otherwise unable to find out about it before their car got towed. Supposedly the “re-striping” would only take a day, but in reality it always took several days and would be rescheduled multiple times, thus offering even more opportunities for cars to be towed.

I mentioned previously that this apartment complex is in a good area and crime is reasonably low here. There is however one very serious crime which happens somewhat often. The Jefferson County Tire Slasher hits in this area once every few years. Each time the slasher strikes, he slashes multiple tires on between 20 to 50 cars. This usually makes the local news each time it happens and the guy has never been caught. Guess where he likes to hit? Yeah, the street right in front of the Cliffs at 6^th Avenue. Don’t park your car on the street here!

Maintenance Staff Turnover Mystery

Whenever Daffney Skinner is confronted about the maintenance issues on the property, there are generally two excuses she throws out right away. The “waiting on parts” excuse is her first go-to option. When the problem can’t be blamed on parts she will blame her “incompetent” and “lazy” maintenance staff. During the two years I lived here, her entire staff vanished and had to be completely replaced at least twice. Her story is that she “fired” the staff.

After one of these incidents where the entire staff was “fired” and Daffney didn’t have a staff for several weeks, Daffney actually had to send the corporate maintenance supervisor up to my apartment for a maintenance issue. Since there was no staff at this location, the corporate staff had to step in and take over maintenance until they could find more suckers willing to work here. I actually made a point to be home when the corporate maintenance supervisor came up and I specifically asked him why there was such a high turnover rate for the maintenance staff. He said that they kept quitting without notice and he didn’t know why. When I said that Daffney claimed she fired them, he said that wasn’t the case. Yet another lie she was caught in.

My theory is that nobody wants to work here. Between the huge backlog of unresolved maintenance issues, the horribly wrecked landscaping, the constantly broken pool and the fact that Daffney would be their boss, it is probably nigh on impossible to find anyone who can tolerate to work here for more than a few weeks. I don’t think I ever saw the same maintenance worker twice and I’m not surprised.

Elevator

The elevator in my building was like riding a terrible rollercoaster at the oldest and most run-down amusement park you could think of. Loud groaning sounds, metal clanging, sudden starts and stops, and obvious visible maintenance issues made this one terrifying ride, and not for any of the right reasons. Like the pool, the elevator spent a lot of time broken. Also like the pool, Dannfey Skinner was quick to trot out the “waiting on parts” excuse.

I think what was even worse than the elevator being broken was the fact that the management once again displayed their “paint over it” mentality by making purely aesthetic improvements to the elevator without doing anything about the underlying maintenance issues.

First, they literally “painted over it” by repainting the interior of the elevator. Then, they put up these gaudy plastic panels which were bolted to the inside of the elevator like some kind of quasi-industrial style that you would see in a Chipotle restaurant. Lastly, as if painting wasn’t good enough, they went to the effort of putting up wall paper inside the elevator! Who in their right mind thinks it is a good idea to wall paper an elevator? Who even uses wall paper any more?

Naturally, it didn’t take long before the residents started sabotaging stuff. Most of the bolts holding the plastic panels in place got removed within a few weeks, meaning the panels were dangling from only a few bolts that people apparently couldn’t get off. The whole effort was a waste of time and made the already dangerous elevators look even more run-down and tore up.

Laundry Rooms

Aside from the fact that you could expect to spend $3.00 to do a single load of laundry, the laundry machines themselves were usually (but not always) working. I can’t complain too much about that. However the rest of the laundry room is a different story.

The laundry rooms were suspiciously well decorated, although it looked like the decoration had taken place some time back in the 1970’s. There were tall metal chairs with wooden seats and a high table. Everything was painted dark orange and vomit green. Don’t dare try sitting in the chairs. The wooden seat was only attached by a single bolt and the whole thing would tip over if anyone sat in it. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.

The vending machine in the laundry room was unpredictable. Aside from eating change, it didn’t always dispense the type soda which was selected. One time a friend who came to my apartment wanted a soda but I didn’t have any. I warned him of the danger of using the vending machine but he decided to take his chances. He got a can out of the machine, but when he opened it all that was in it was compressed air. It popped open with that satisfying hiss that you expect from a can of soda, but nothing was inside.

The Battle for Heat

I personally never used the heat in my apartment because it was always swelteringly hot all year round. Between the heat and the smoke detector issues, I got used to simply having my doors and windows open and using a lot of fans.  However, apparently someone in this building wanted heat, which caused what I felt was the best poetic justice I’ve ever seen levied against an abusive apartment complex.

One of our notoriously unpredictable Colorado winters was very cold. The squirrels ripped up my patio furniture to try to make insulation for their nests, and when that didn’t work they chewed through the rotten boards on my deck to get inside the walls of the building. That’s how cold it was. The winter storms began as early as September, only getting worse in October. Naturally, people began clamoring for the heat to be turned on.

Well, apparently the Cliffs turns the heat off seasonally. They won’t turn it back on, according to Daffney Skinner, unless there has been three continuous days of low temperatures. The key word there being continuous. If you live in Colorado you know that isn’t how things work here. You can have a deadly blizzard in the middle of July or a surprise heat wave in January. A white Christmas? Try a tornado Christmas! Nothing is ever continuous for three days here. So naturally, this is a very convenient excuse for the apartment complex to save money by not turning the heat on, since their requirement for three days of low temperatures may not occur until February.

But that isn’t how Colorado law works. When a tenant requests heat, the landlord is required to provide it. It doesn’t matter what the temperature outside is. That’s the law.

So someone in the apartment complex (I sadly never learned who) actually organized a “Tenant Right’s Group” to fight back against Daffney Skinner. He contacted the State of Colorado and the Jefferson County government was well. He contacted a lawyer who wrote up some stuff explaining the requirement for landlords to provide heat in Colorado. He posted letters all over the complex getting other tenants involved. And best of all, he even organized a small protest in front of the leasing office.

Suddenly, the heat clicked on. As much as I enjoyed the thought of Daffney Skinner squirming in her office while the government investigated and people protested just a few feet away, it is still sad that this was the lengths people had to go to just to get her to comply with Colorado state law. Even sadder still is that Colorado has some of the weakest tenant protection laws in the country, so it is usually easy for landlords to get away with this kind of stuff here.

Moveout Revenge

When I finally moved out, Daffney Skinner pretended to be nice about it. But I knew that was just a show. I fully expected her to come after me for more money, so I made sure to clean my apartment top to bottom very carefully. I spent about six straight hours just cleaning. When I was done, I photographed every room (from two angles each) and also photographed key areas, like the bathroom, sinks, countertops, close ups of the carpeting etc.

Daffney still found clever ways to justify keeping my deposit and demanding extra money. She claimed I didn’t clean the oven, which I did, but didn’t think to take a picture of to prove it. She also included things like a $25 fee for “Rental Income” and a “Global Fee” for nothing in particular.

To add insult to injury, she immediately turned the bill over to a debt collection agency. Less than two weeks after I got the bill from her (which had no due date on it) I already started getting threatening letters from a collection agency demanding payment!

Summary

I typed this up in word  before posting it here and it is already up to over eight pages and almost 4,800 words. Not only that, but I plan to attach a ton of pictures I took of this apartment complex while I lived here. Every time I found a problem, I took a picture, so I have quite a few of them. I could keep going with complaints and crazy stories about this apartment complex all day, but I have to cut this off somewhere.

Suffice to say, this place is a maintenance nightmare. The property manger Daffney Skinner lures in new tenants by making sure that the leasing office (which was recently renovated yet again) and the parts of the property which are visible from the street look fantastic. Other parts of the property, such as the pool and the elevators, receive occasional aesthetic improvements, but this “paint over it” mentality only makes things appear better on the outside without addressing any of the underlying maintenance issues. No matter how nice the pool building looks, you still won’t be able to swim in the pool, because the heat is turned off. No matter how they redecorate the elevator, you still won’t want to ride in the elevator, because it sounds like it might explode with you in it. Don’t walk around the property without your most water-proof pair of boots, unless you enjoy stepping in mud holes and flooding pool water.

Combine this with the bad tenants, who constantly smoke pot, sabotage the security doors and have banned dogs they keep hidden on the property. When you check the photos that I’m going to upload with this complaint, you will see that tenants are constantly posting notes on the doors to argue with the apartment management and each other, because nobody is happy here.

If you are thinking about moving in here, DON’T. If you live here now, GET OUT. If you visit the leasing office, don’t believe anything Daffney Skinner says, as she proved herself to me as a lair and a thief. Because of all the people moving here from the coasts, finding a place to live in Colorado can be hard. But trust me, you can do better than this. You would be hard pressed to do worse. Look elsewhere.