The Lofts at Harmony Mills — Attraction in City of Cohoes

DISCRIMINATION - LIES - GHOSTING - COLLECTIONS - This place is full of monsters!!!

To start with the quality, thin walls you can hear every neighbors conversations. Neighbors smoked inside on occasion and thin walls lended great to the smell too. Not to mention the blaring fire alarms and constant fire trucks to the building. Don’t think you’ll ever sleep again when you can FEEL your neighbors bass through your headphones. Dead mice and animals constantly in the garages and first floor halls. Amenities were broken down the majority of the time my mother was there. The viral TikTok videos and BuzzFeed news articles should be enough to dissuade you. Staff is awful after you move in, only 1-2 decent ones and management is soulless monsters. As soon as you move in you’re just a dollar sign they don’t want to be inconvenienced by.

So now into the personal story of why these people should not be in business anymore. I am writing this as a disabled adult dependent of my senior mother. We live together when she isn’t traveling because of my severe health issues making it hard for me to be financially on my own. I pay my personal things but I work freelance around my health so I don’t have paystubs or credit history that apartments like. We came to Harmony Mills together to hopefully get an apartment we could stay in long term.

They discriminated against my credit score, even though I am again - a dependent. After long conversations they agreed I could move in with her once my credit score was fixed. So we fixed it within 2 months of moving in and then they ghosted us. I was couch surfing family and friends waiting to have a stable home again. Then I find out most her neighbors did not have credit scores or finances checked for their roommates/partners. So it was just us. They were taking $2000 a month from us while ignoring any plea to use the space we were paying for.

We filled out requests we did everything by the book and after 6 months of not having a home we decided to look elsewhere. We could not financially afford 2 places so we broke lease early on the point of discrimination and everything else that was beyond lacking here. They told us we owed them $5000 which we formally wrote up our complains in detail with attached records of us trying to just live in our own place. They were happy to take our money but not to give us what we were paying for. Asked next steps to move forward to avoid court or news and they not only ignored us but MONTHS later sent it to collections. My mother is 68 and never had a single collections or debt with insane credit history. She’s a cancer survivor and an Angel and doesn’t deserve any of this. I’ve been sick since I was a literal child and she always showed up to make sure I felt normal and cared for. Typing this all I’m crying because all she ever did was try to be a good mom and now is being taken advantage of by this monster.

Harmony Mills lied to us to get our money, and still is riding us for more half a year later. We paid $2000 a month for a glorified storage unit and that still wasn’t enough.

How anyone can stay in business like...

I want to leave a fair and honest review after living here for a year. For clarity, we bought a home in order to leave the renting market so that is why we are no longer there.

My main reason for the rating is the difficulties we had doing anything related to the office. I will not blame the wonderful people who actually work there as they are forced to do so much more than they should. Fielding calls, managing residents, giving tours, ect. When we were attempting to move out, it was a constant game of calling them to ask simple questions and then immediately realizing they had no idea what to do. I believe for the price we pay for this building, hire more people. Hire a receptionist full time who is trained for this. Hire someone to manage move out and rent questions. We only got one key fob and were told we would be given another then went a solid year to just NOT be given one. With full time jobs and the leasing office only open while we were at work (and no knowledge of when someone would actually be there), it was frustrating. The final straw for us was my fiance calling multiple times to confirm everything was good and then getting blasted with a bill 2 months later and being threatened that it might go to collections. We didn't even have the bill before hand and had triple checked to make sure we were good.

Another thing is package thieves. These are unavoidable it feels but they don't even lock the door near the mailboxes. That helps no one.

The location- It's fine. It's in a good space near Troy and Latham so you can easily get to those places. We lived in the building closer to the falls and parked in the garage. One issue we did run into was there is a distinct lack of space for moving in residents leading to people using the garage doors as move in and out doors, sometimes clogging it up and making for stressful situations. In general, from what I've heard, the parking situation leaves a lot to be desired. It's good in the winter, when you have a slot in the garage. Being near the street was a pain so perhaps don't live near there if you have issues sleeping as sometimes people really get wild.

Amenities/Maintenance- Our laundry machine was mildly faulty and generated astronomical amounts of lint and was very difficult to clean. I thought it was our fault but our new machine works just fine and is possibly the same age as these. Whenever we had issues, people would come relatively fast, which was nice.

It's a good place to live if you can afford it. They are willing to work with you, if you can get ahold of them, but it is fairly unorganized. Also, because it is a pet friendly building, sometimes you'll be stuck next to someone with a loud dog possibly. Our upstairs neighbor had a large dog that kept knocking over its water bowl which caused water to leak down our walls and fry my computer. Just stuff to keep in mind.

My only hopes is that they bolster their staff and are more on the ball with fixing things. Add...

The physical beauty of these apartments is drastically overshadowed by the TERRIBLE management. Living here is not worth your money or the time you'll spend complaining about issues that management will never resolve. In fact, the Lofts would rather kick out good tenants than take the time to address the problems they encounter.

We lived in the Lofts for 3 years, always paid rent on time, referred several new tenants, and were very active in the community prior to the covid restrictions. Several months ago, the Lofts changed our electric provider to AUM, and our electric bills have steadily increased. Due to this, we have regularly reached out to point out errors and overcharges in our bills. And have had to FIGHT with management to correct their errors. Wouldn't you know it, this week I received a letter telling us they wouldn't be allowing us to renew our lease this year. I called management to give them the chance to explain this, and informed them that we felt we were being retaliated against for bringing up the electric issues. They told us they weren't able to discuss this with us. So it certainly seems that the Lofts is knowingly using a fraudulent electric company that overcharges their residents because they get some sort of kick-back 🤷‍♀️

But in case that isn't enough to keep you from renting here, let me share with you a more complete list of the issues we ran into during our time here (and check out the pictures too):

consistently overcharged for electricity through a fraudulent electric company (look up AUM, read their reviews) charged full priced rent during COVID despite not having access to amenities mice in the hallways graffiti/vandalism from residents hallway carpets soaked with dog pee broken gym equipment never replaced hot water heater died and leaked through the ceilings (the old broken unit is still sitting in our attic) air conditioning unit leaked through the ceilings washing machine stopped working twice (had to bail out machine manually and save our clothes from the dirty water they were left soaking in) cheap appliances that break off in your hand (fridge handles, sink faucets, toilet handles...) personal belongings in storage unit were damaged by leaking pipes chunks of hardwood floor missing or shoddily "repaired" forced to leave the gym during a workout so management could take pictures of the equipment for their website Oh, and I got stuck in the elevator of my building. Had to call the fire department ourselves because the emergency call button in the elevator was not connected to anyone. (But don't worry! I was later told "this never happens to...