I lived in a 300sqft apartment in a bad neighborhood. eight women were raped in my parking lot over the span of a year.

along the baseboard of the entire apartment was cat litter from the previous tenant.

the kitchen was painted flat black. the cabinets, the floor, the ceiling, the sink, the counter tops, the walls, the stove. everything. there was a window but it did nothing.

there was one door in the whole apartment, the front door. no door on the bathroom, no door on the bedroom, hell there wasn’t even a wall for the bedroom.

the bathroom was 5’ 8" tall. I know this because I’m over 6’ tall.

the HVAC system never had a filter in it. I know this because to cool my 300sqft it cost me $700 one month and I thought, “no fucking way!” I pulled the side of the blower off and looked up into the a-coil. it was so matted with hair, fur, dust, dirt, it looked like cardboard. it took me four hours and two bottles of bleach spray to clean it with a toilet brush in 100°+ weather.

so to recap on what I did

• cleaned the litter up
• steamed the carpets twice (probably for the first time ever)
• freshly painted the kitchen
• refurbished the kitchen cabinets, stove, and sink and made them look brand new
• cleaned the HVAC system
• installed new insulation in the bathroom so it wasn’t 13° in the winter and trimmed it up
• installed plug plates because half of them were missing
• replaced some of the plugs because they were so worn out they stopped working

now, some of you might say, “you’re an idiot because you did all that free work!” and normally you’d be right, but this landlord never answered their phone unless you missed rent.

when I left that fat fuck tried to keep my deposit because I didn’t have proof that the carpets were cleaned. Told him they were cleaned, personally by myself with my own equipment. then said there was trash left behind, then explained the furniture left behind was there I moved in. bastard kept half still.

worst apartment I’ve ever had. I was burned so bad the next place I took pictures of EVERYTHING before a box was moved in. that’s a story for another time though.

A nice two bedroom, well-priced, with my partner and my friend. It was clean, maintenance was prompt, they had a great mail system.

It caught fire twice, then again after we moved out. aaaaaaaaaaa

An unfinished garage with no plumbing for 1200 a month because it was the cheapest place within driving distance to work. I kept a gym membership for necessities and carefully planned my meals for 3 years

I finally left when a bee hive formed in the walls and the landlady refused to do anything about it

When I was little we used to live in this flat which was awful. constant noise from people upstairs and arround us, and water leakage issues

I rented a house with a bathtub that drained directly into the crawlspace… We also had a groundhog crawl up from the crawlspace into our walls where our hot water tank was. (Yes, the landlord put the hot water tank IN the wall. You had to deconstruct part of the house to get to it.)

My first apartment.

• Door had residue of a police seal stuck on it
• Door frame was broken, as the door was kicked in by the police due to the previous tenant (I later had the pleasure of meeting the guy. Was a friendly guy. No idea what he did to have the police kick in the door)
• Measuring devices on the radiators were broken (for years, aparently), so heating bill was completely dependent on the floor area. Which is fun, as I had neighbors who just had the heating on full blast throughout the winter
• No wall in the building had a 90° angle. Very annoying to place furniture
• You know how you normally nail floor skirting boards down, or at least use some fixture? Well, the previous tenant used caulking silicone to glue them down. Very fun to remove.
• The living room had wooden laminate flooring. But instead of normal insulation and dampaning underneath, they just… put it on top of the existing carpet that was already there. Which was partially moldy. And completely glued in. That was very much not fun to remove (it involved drills with a wire brush attachment to grind off the glue residue. In 35C summer heat)
• I never got a key to the basement, where the trash containers were. Always had to be lucky for the door to be left open or ask a neighbor
• speaking of neighbors:
• One guy, two floors above me, looked like the stereotypical “short, fat guy with a wifebeater shirt”. Was friendly if he liked you. But if you made too much noise outside on the street (which was a pedestrian shopping street) at night, he’d go down with a baseball bat. Also was weirdly obsessed with having a professional soda fountain in his kitchen and wanted to sell me one as well (like those things you see in fasat food restaurants). And he had a couple sphinx cats. All in all a 9/10 GTA character
• later a new neighbor moved in next door. Never really met him, besides him asking me for a lighter one night. He did get picked up by the cops one day, because he walked through a shopping center wearing just boxer shorts and being high as a kite. One day he got kicked out. Because he decided it was too cold, tore out some of the wooden floor panels and lit them on fire on the (now concrete) floor

I lasted 6 months. Until I found another apartment in that city. Which also had its problems, but nowhere near as the first apartment.

It was both best and worst since I’ve only lived in one apartment in my life

It was actually a pretty nice apartment, I might still happily be there if they hadn’t kept jacking up the rent every year.

But I had some complaints

The kitchen was ridiculously tiny, and one of the cabinets couldn’t open all the way because it hit an overhead light fixture. We actually pointed that out when we first viewed the apartment (it had recently had some light renovations and that was obviously an oversight) and to their credit they installed a smaller fixture before we moved it. It still got in the way and the cabinet didn’t open 100% but it opened wide enough to get anything you needed in and out.

The bathroom vent fans definitely shared ductwork with other units, and someone along that vent liked to sing in the shower. We also occasionally heard her yelling at her kids. We didn’t mind that so much, it’s kind of part of living in an apartment that sometimes you’re going to hear what your neighbors are doing, it was usually more funny than anything, but it was a little weird the first time we heard someone singing from our bathroom.

The people above us liked to vacuum at like 10am on a Sunday. Not too unreasonable I suppose, but I worked night shift and it could be a little annoying from time to time when I was trying to sleep

They also had some kind of water leak one time that fucked up our ceilings a bit, and it also leaked right into our circuit breaker causing some electrical issues. No serious damage done though, and again they were quick to repair it.

When we moved out, our roommate discovered that the window in his room was leaky, which had caused some mold and water damage in his room. He never noticed it until then because of how he had some furniture placed along that wall.

There really wasn’t any decent spot to have any sort of a proper dining table, at least not if you also wanted to have a couch and a TV, so we pretty much ate off the coffee table or folding tray tables the whole time we lived there. (The apartment was actually fairly spacious overall, it was just sort of laid out weirdly)

I lived too close to a hospital. Apparently, the road I lived next to was the road that all fire, EMS, and police used. Tons of sirens at all hours of the night and day. I toured the place on a quiet day, so it never occurred to me about the noise. That was a bit of a suffer fest.

One funny thing about that place, someone always swore consistently on the street between 17:00-20:00 each evening. It was always someone new, but it was like clockwork. Guests wouldn’t believe it at first, but it became a thing, lol. Sometimes it was someone on a skateboard eating shit in the protected bike lane, other times it was a pissed off pedestrian, someone having an argument, someone having fun, or someone clearly off their medication. No apartment has had that before or since.

I have two from the many I’ve had and I’ll let you decide which was worse.

1: lived on 3rd floor. Found out that the neighbor across the hall was found dead from suicide a few weeks before we moved in. Neighbor below in 2nd floor regularly had all night parties. Got so fucked upon drugs they took a hammer to the walls and plumbing which flooded the entire 2nd and first floors.

A few weeks later they ordered pizza, murdered the driver with a hammer and pillow and stole the $50 they had plus their $1000 car. I think she got life in prison and the guy with her got some other deal.

2: many years later moved into a cheap apartment close to work when the previous place jacked rent up almost 100% with only a months notice. No a/c. The windows had no screens but we a really odd shape. The walls had drywall but it had been removed to expose the brick, but that left a gap at the ceiling. That’s how rats and mice would fall in. Also roaches. The fridge was brand new but full size, which blocked half of the entrance to the kitchen. The neighbor across from me would catch their mice on sticky traps and out set them out in front of their door, right next to their garbage sacks that they would leave for days. This was somewhat understandable because the garbage bin for the building was too small and always overflowing.

It was defiantly the worst but it was also my favorite. Wont get into too many details but it was an awesome location with great company. A little hot and cramped but overall comfortable. Great layout. Thin walls and bad neighbors. Definitely not how I was used to living.

Belleville, NJ, 11 years ago. 1 bedroom apartment, was the only thing my now ex-spouse and I could afford when we moved across the US for me to start a new job. You ever watch Law & Order? You know those apartment complexes the detectives go into to interview a witness or whatever, and as they’re walking through the hallways, there’s babies crying and adults yelling at each other from behind closed doors, and trash/used drug needles in the hallways? That was this place.

Our downstairs neighbor was a total shitbag that blasted loud music every moment he was awake. Called the cops so many times, nothing ever came of it. I hope he’s dead now, for real.

Upstairs neighbor would come home drunk all the time and yell at his wife and throw shit. One time he tried to get into our apartment by mistake, thank God we had the door locked. They would run the water in their bathroom until the tub overflowed into our bathroom below it. One time we had water coming out of the fuse box and had no power for a week. One time our toilet broke and we had to use the toilet in the empty apartment across the hall until it was fixed. The “empty” apartment had a couch and a compound hunting bow with arrows just sitting there.

There was a rodent problem; thank God we had a cat.

We were supposed to have an assigned parking space, but that was a lie. The night we got there/moved in, it had snowed. I parked the car in an empty spot. 3 hours later, a woman is SCREAMING in the hallways “WHO IS FROM (insert state license plate we just moved from)!??” Apparently we parked in her spot, and she was not happy. Had to move the car. When I moved the car, one of the brake lines failed and I was barely able to guide it into a snowbank; had to get it towed the next day to get it fixed.

The whole experience was a nightmare. We only lived there for a year, but I get anxiety just thinking about it.

Just some german cockroaches. They won the war.

Technically the one I’m currently in since it’s the first one I’ve ever lived.

The people upstairs, twice, went and installed a bidet ( we’re not really allowed to do our own plumbing for a reason and they proved why ) and it caused a giant ceiling bubble the second time in the bathroom. The apartment directly below us has been empty for a long time with nobody working on fixing the gutted place for a while, but IIRC when they were having some company working on it, they accidentally caused our dishwasher to start to flood. So for a long time we had the floor being worked on. The dishwasher thing might have been caused by some other water/plumbing issues somewhere else that caused it, I don’t remember.

My brother, being the idiot he is, decided at one point to take a couch from near the dumpster and now I have firsthand experience with bedbugs. We have dealt with a minor mice problem. It was probably a homeless person, but my dad had a bike stolen from the balcony. There were two times where some idiot tenants started fires and one of the sets of apartments is still being fixed from the damage.

Other than that, I can’t complain too much because I don’t really have that many problems here and it’s definitely 1000x better than where I could be right now. It’s definitely not as bad as I make it out to be, based on what I’ve said has happened.

Right on the motorway, didnt sleep when I was there, preferred to sleep under my desk at work.

Brooklyn, lived above a crack dealer who loved to test car stereos all night long, every day with Dad rock. Wednesday at 4am? Yup! Saturday at 8am? You bet your fucking ass.

He also had a giant black lab who he let pee freely anywhere, including inside the stairwell. One day that dog ran away.