The Continental

Want a notice on your door every other week that they’re going to come in to your apartment to “change the smoke alarm batteries and check air filter”? Great! Move in! Want your car to get towed for no reason and be forced to pay $150 to get it out even when you have a parking permit? This is the place for you! Want your car to get constantly destroyed by people not knowing how to park and also have your car broken into constantly by the EXTREME amount of homeless people in the area? You’re in the right place! Would you like an apartment that looks like the apartment in the pictures? This is not the place for that! Enjoy the smell of weed blowing through your AC unit every day making your apartment smell disgusting? You’re right at home! Want to be left without AC for a month because your AC unit was 100 years old and broke and it’ll take an entire month to get a new one in? Awesome! Love that AZ Heat! Want to be told that “utilities are included” when it’s just a big lie to get you to move in and that you, in fact, still have an additional electricity and water bill? Super! Seriously. The price is appealing, I’ll give it that, and the pictures are pretty. But when you move in, the ONLY thing nice about this place is the stainless steel appliances. You’ll get vinyl flooring (that doesn’t look like the one in the pictures) that’s incredibly water damaged and stained and just flat out ugly. The cabinets are older than you, so they’re extremely destroyed and scuffed up. You’ll have the worst water damage patchwork over your bathtub that I’ve ever seen it’ll have you scared that the upstairs neighbors bathtub is going to collapse on you while you’re showering. The walls are thin, so you’ll hear everything your next door neighbor does. And if you get a downstairs apartment, you’ll always hear your upstairs neighbor walking around. Sometimes people like to party at the pool well after 9pm, and the pool is literally right outside your window no matter where you are in this place so you’ll hear them screaming and splashing all night. People will run into your brand new car in the parking lot and not leave insurance info of course so you’ll be stuck with dents, scrapes, and scratches that you have to pay for. There’s just so much honestly. Please don’t make the same mistake I did. Find somewhere else to live, you’ll be miserable here.

The Continental Apartments is a great complex for a young person who wants to live in the Phoenix downtown area. The complex mostly has studio apartments (with 1 bedrooms hard to come by), but they are built in a nice way that doesn't feel like just one room. The units seem to have been updated fairly recently, and look modern enough to make people who visit my apartment say it looks nice. However, there are some amenities I would prefer this unit to have (two of which seem to have previously been in the unit but taken out). First, there isn't central air conditioning, something that can be burdensome in the summer. I had to continuously run the air conditioner or else my unit would get too hot to enjoy myself; however, my kitchen and bathroom seemed to be always hot with no easy way for the air conditioning to get to the other side of the unit. Second, I would prefer to have a garbage disposal in my unit. Finally, there is no electric outlets in the bathroom, which gets frustrating because I have multiple electricity powered bathroom items. The location of the unit is great, walking distance from multiple restaurants, coffee shops, bars, and the light rail.