I've had it up to here with apartment life!

The BBQ Pit
41

I’ll see your apartment and raise you a shared house :rolleyes:

I was hoping mr bloody Estonian would move out this month as he promised, so there’d be no more thumpingly loud music and problems with the recycling bin (see, the picture of a box with a face and legs on the lid is a cartoon and not representative of the actual box :smack: ) etc. But instead, he decided to stay and invited an neanderthal friend of his to move into the room under mine, where he plays loud dance music at 6am :smack: :smack: :smack:

42

Envy! How I wish my condo assoc would finally adopt “no cars parked on street” bylaws. We’ve got narrow streets, and tiny townhouse driveways – but half the people who live here have at least two giant-ass SUVs. They’re always, shocked – shocked! – at the thought that they might have to park one in their garage and one in their driveway, and get up off their asses and move both cars if they need to switch them out.

Instead, we have vehicle obstacle course streets which the fire department complains about, because the double-parked SUVs take up too much space for the trucks to get by.

If we had any hooligan kids around, I’d suggest one of 'em light something on fire past the SUV blockade, just to enjoy the spectacle of the firetrucks ramming past all the SUVs as the fire marshal has assured us they’ll do…

By the way, apartment-lovers who’ve got the $ should definately look into getting a condo. You can even get one with maintenance included, and it’s much better building equity and laughing at the homeowner sclubs who have to mow the grass twice weekly. Pointing and laughing without the extra money in the bank isn’t quite as fun.

43

This thread is now about apartment-living horror stories. :smiley:

Honestly, I’ve had mixed results living in apartments. When I lived in an apartment in Baltimore County for two years, I had one of the worst landlords imaginable:

[ul]
[li]Apartment was filthy when I got it. The woman who had lived there before me had smoked for 20 years in it. Every wall and surface was caked in yellowish-brown grime. Holes in the screens and no shades on the windows. Air filters that were installed during the Carter Administration. Neighborhood kids peeping in my windows. But since it was the first apartment that I could actually call mine, I didn’t complain because I didn’t want to make waves, though I did manage to get him to install window shades and replace the screens. [/li][li]Flood #1: Hurricane Isabel struck and since I had a basement apartment, I woke up with about four inches of water covering my floor. I lost a lot of clothes (since I had the bad habit of leaving dirty clothes on the floor – I’ve certainly learned my lesson on that one). Landlord said it was covered under his insurance, but I never saw a penny of it.[/li][li]Flood #2: I woke up for the second time and got out of bed, my feet landed in another few inches of water, not to mention a disgusting odor in the apartment. Turns out that the neighborhood sewer line had backed up, and raw sewage was coming up from my bathroom sink (Ewwww! :eek: ). After much harranguing, Landlord sent a couple of guys to clean up the apartment. I lost more clothes and had to buy all new power cords for my computer. Landlord said that he’ll take it up with the city and get them to reimburse me, but that never happened.[/li][li]Flood #3: Woke up again to put my feet down in water (you’d think I’d expect water on the floor every day when I woke up, and believe me, I did). This flood was worse than the other two. The upstairs neighbor’s unserviced, uninspected water heater had exploded and dumped gallons upon gallons of water into my apartment. This time, I called his office several times a day until he sent guys to clean up my apartment AND buy me new area rugs. Never a single word of apology.[/li][/ul]
To top it all off, on my move-out inspection, he had the nerve to tell me that the hardwood floors were damaged by my cats! He said that he has a “friend” who can tell the difference between water damage and cat urine damage, and he can bring him out. All this after he told me repeatedly that he wanted to come in and replace the floors anyway. Forget it… I let him keep the $100 pet deposit because I was sick of his crap and wanted a good reference.

On the lighter side, the place I live in now is great. Quiet neighbors, no kids, good neighborhood, and no complaints. Apartment living is a double-edged sword. Just do research first.

Sorry if this was a slight hijack.
Adam

44

You’re spot on there. Consider today’s home market, and by the time things are said and done, you’re at a less than 1% ROI in some cases. You just don’t pay for a house, you pay real estate agents, lawyers and inspectors (closing costs). You pay PMI, and you pay insurance agents, you pay every single utility, you pay (and this one’s a biggie) to maintain your property. You pay taxes, you pay for permits to upgrade your house, and of course, you pay to upgrade your house. You pay taxes on all the materials you buy to maintain and upgrade your house, and you pay for the labor (when necessary) who in turn (usually) pays taxes on the money he collects from you.

Consider your time as value; When whatever it is breaks, who fixes it? You guessed it, YOU. If you can’t, someone is gonna make a bunch of money from that fact, and if you try to fix it and don’t know how, that’ll cost you more.

Renting can keep you agile and able to make investments that will reap far greater rewards than a home will. Of course, if you need it, you need it, but I for one can’t WAIT to sell my house and get out from under everything that comes with it.

45

OTOH, landlords aren’t living with the problems that a broken whatever-it-is causes in your life, so they can be less motivated to get it fixed in a timely manner than you would like, or than you would be if you owned the place. I dealt with this recently when our dishwasher broke. Getting someone out to look at and fix or replace our dishwasher was clearly not a high priority for our landlords- why should it be, they weren’t the ones having to put up with hand-washing the dishes (I hate hand-washing dishes with the fire of 1000 suns).

Oh, and if you rent an apartment, and you find that everything in your kitchen was put in by the lowest bidder, and it shows, there’s not much you can do about it unless it’s bad enough to warrant moving out. Whoever installed the kitchens in our apartment complex (and it was a new complex when we moved in in 2003) clearly went with cheap cabinetry and appliances. The only thing I could do when one of the cabinet doors came off its hinges and fell on me (luckily, my reflexes are better than I thought, and I caught it, so I wasn’t hurt and nothing was broken) was to get the maintenance guy to come in and install a replacement door that was just as cheap as the original door. And forget about having a problem like an oven with an inaccurate thermostat or stove burners that won’t stay plugged into their sockets fixed… “We pushed the stove burners back into the sockets, and they work now”. Yes, but they will stop working again in a few days, and I know that electric stoves that don’t have this problem do exist…

I am also moving into my first house in August. I will miss being able to call the maintenance guy to fix stuff, but I will probably miss it less now than I might have if I had moved from my last apartment to the house, because I’ve dealt with an apartment complex management that sets up hoops for people to jump through to get the maintenance guy in (requiring all maintenance requests to be submitted in writing? WTF?) and clearly doesn’t think that getting stuff fixed for tenants is a priority.

I’m so happy that I’m moving to a house with no homeowner’s association! :smiley: I have bad memories of the homeowner’s association in the neighborhood where I lived when I was in high school- people literally got hate mail sent to them for not taking proper care of their yards. The purpose of too many homeowner’s associations seems to be to keep everyone’s house looking the same, and frankly I prefer a neighborhood like the one I’m moving to (Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh), where you’re likely to find a Tudor next to a ranch next to a Victorian.

Oh, and I’ll be rid of the Northern California Kitchen Basketball Association that had the apartment above mine. That was the only explanation Mr. Neville and I could ever think up for what they could be doing that would explain the noises we heard from our ceiling…

46

Hey, Anne. My parents lived in Squirrel Hill when I was born, and until I was three years old. I remember it even. That’s all. :smiley:

47

Well, that’s true of course, but I’m fortunate enough to have the time and money to be discriminating about where I go. I’ll talk to some residents, talk to the maintenance staff, and I’ll have a management company with stakeholders to complain to.

Here again, at least in my case, I’m not taking the first thing that comes available. The lowest bidder thing though is the case everywhere, even potentially in the house you’re about to move into, it’s how it works. That said though, I’m not sure that the places I’m looking, the lowest bidder thing would be a concern.

Here and here.

Congrats on your new abode though, I hope it brings you the joy you’re looking for.

Amen to that! I cannot stand the whole homogenized neightboorhood aesthetic. Not for a minute. That sounds a little hypocritical with my looking at the big high-rises, but I want different things. I don’t want to have to worry about the outside stuff. I want to decorate the inside, and let it go at that. If I ever get back into a house though, I’ll tell you that it’ll be somewhere withOUT a homeowners association.

48

I think my situation is a little different that what most of you are describing. I don’t live in a dedicated apartment complex; it’s a two-family home where the upstairs is one apartment and the downstairs is ours. So it’s more of a duplex situation. For the urban dwellers and those who just aren’t interested in the space outside of their homes, I think apartments are logical and great ideas. I suppose it’s a personal thing, but I hardly think we’ll come to some consensus about which is better, owning or renting. For me, at this point in life, buying is so much better. I like buying my own appliances and service contract that suits my needs!

Our apartment came with a stove, dishwasher and fridge, but all of the other major appliances - washer, dryer, a/c unit - we bought ourselves. So we’re responsible for the upkeep of those. I’m pretty handy around the house, so a lot of times when something goes tits up I let the landlords know, and they’re very cool about “hey, if you can fix it yourself, deduct the cost of the repair and give yourself $50 for labor.” Occasionally these problems are beyond my ken (huge blockage in the plumbing) and we have a pro come in and do it. But I have to use the people who my LL wants, which isn’t always my favorite choice. In all honesty, the LL issues with us are virtually nonexistent. It’s having to be so close and share space with tools (the human kind).

HOAs can be ridiculous - as I mentioned, my dad had a run in with one when we first moved to Austin - but now he wishes he had something to compel the surrounding neighbors to keep their yards tidy, force people to stop working on their cars on the lawns, and most recently, the jackasses who set up a prison-yard-style weightbench in the front yard! Recently our neighbor, who is living with her daughter whose husband is serving in Iraq, wanted to go shopping late one evening and some asshole down the street parked in a way that her driveway was blocked. So she had to find the party, find the host, and get the fool to move his/her truck. This took about 45 minutes.

The cops are pretty uninterested in doing much around the neighborhood. When we first moved there, there was a neighborhood watch, and we had pretty good relations with the sheriff. Now the subdivision has been incorporated into the city and people have moved and started renting, the neighborhood watch exists in name only. The old guard like my parents and their neighbors are near retirement age. Taggers and jackasses with booming stereos like to cruise around, and there’s been several break-ins with cars - stealing radios and siphoning gas.

The subdivision where we bought our house has houses built by the same builder, so yeah, it looks uniform to a degree, but that’s Texas for you. And if the HOA stops people from turning their yards into a “yard,” I’m ecstatic. I believe in cutting the grass weekly and trimming the hedges, so I don’t think they’ll be a problem to me. I’m also young enough to get involved if they seem to be crossing a line.

I also like little kids in a neighborhood. I have one on the way. :slight_smile: My solution to the backing out issue is to back into my own driveway, so when I leave I’m directly facing the street.

49

So did we. Our problem was, it started out decent, and then went downhill while we lived there. The maintenance guy was always a little overbooked, but at first they would take calls for maintenance requests (like every other apartment complex I’ve lived in) and got them done in a fairly timely manner. It seems to have gotten a lot worse this year, though- they instituted that new policy that maintenance requests have to be in writing, with no purpose that I can see other than to discourage people from making maintenance requests :mad:

Actually, the complex I lived with that had hands-down the best management was managed by a husband-and-wife team, no management company. Some management companies, like the one that runs my current apartment building, seem to be more interested in saving money wherever they can than in keeping their tenants happy.

For what we’re paying in rent, I wouldn’t have thought it would be, either, but it is. This is a fairly fancy complex in an expensive location- it’s not just cheap apartment buildings in bad neighborhoods that have that problem.

My point was, though, that, if you find a problem like cabinet doors falling on your head in a house or condo you own, you have the option to replace them. It’s not free, but it is an option, which it isn’t in an apartment building like ours.

Best of luck in finding a good apartment. Here’s a site I like for comparing apartment complexes.

50

Yes, this is how I feel about HOA’s, too. Sometimes they can be a pain, but often, they’re the only thing keeping your neighborhood from becoming a crappy hellhole. Ours prohibits parking cars overnight in the street, which at first pissed off Mr. brown, but now we are thankful we have it. It makes it hard for people to move a huge extended family into one home if they have nowhere to park their 87 trucks. Also, our HOA is the only thing keeping some inhabitants from blasting bass-heavy music in their front yards or dragging used kitchen furniture permanently onto the lawns for use as a party location.

51

For anyone looking for an apartment: Apartments that have storage closets come in two types. One type has the storage closet attached to your apartment, often on the balcony. The other has a common storage area with individual storage rooms in a parking garage or other communal area. Go with the storage on your balcony. Our building has had all kinds of problems with the common storage areas getting broken into. It’s gotten so bad that now, if you want to access your storage area, you have to give your driver’s license to the person at the front desk and have them go with you into the storage area. So now I can’t get into my storage except during the hours that the front desk people are there.

The only situation here that would really bother me would probably be the person blocking my driveway. I’d rather live with untidy neighbors’ yards than live in a neighborhood where people got hate mail for not cutting their grass often enough. YMMV.

52

Since a HOA is a participatory organization, I think there’s a way to vocalize a level of concern about a minor problem (like having a shaggy lawn). Maybe they can say, “We’ve noticed your grass is a little high - would you like some of us to help you cut it, or recommend some yard services?” I’m the kind of person who will cut a neighbor’s yard if he/she is elderly, or a cool person. The hassle of pulling out the mower is such that you might as well cut everything that needs cutting.

No, I’m more annoyed with these neighbors catty-corner from my parents. They had about twelve people living there, or so it seemed, which is not a problem in and of itself, but the multiple cars were an eyesore. They would drive one or two up on the grass and park it there. And where most people make their backyards their own personal vision of comfort, these assholes flipped the script and brought out the weight bench in the front yard, so the undoubted hotness of the unshirted dudes pumping iron would get the ladies all hot and bothered. Or something like that. To top it off, of course, at least half of the cars had obnoxious booming bass speakers that would shake your windows when they decided to add to the community ambiance by blasting Ying Yang Twins tunes on a Sunday afternoon… evening… night… time to call the cops.

Somehow I think an HOA could have circumvented a lot of these issues. As it is now, you either complain to the cops in anonymity, or you go over and tell them how they are disrupting your day, risking all kinds of problems. The sort that do these kind of things don’t typically engage in wordplay to get their point across.

53

…and I just signed my first ever apartment lease yesterday. :frowning:

It’s nucking futs around here right now. I’m moving an hour and a half away from my current place (yes, Sask dopers, I’m running away to the big city!) and the vacancy rate is 0.5%. It isn’t like ten years ago when my brother had the pick of places at 10% vacancy. I was really wanting a place in this suburb near my work, but there was nothing. I ended up having to do the whole downtown urban highrise thing. Prices are nuts, I’m paying about the same as a friend who got a lease on a two-bedroom condo as opposed to my one-bedroom.

I hope it’s quiet around there. This is a complex owned by, apparently, the largest apartment rental group in Canada. It really looks like a hotel.

54

I agree with all you have said.

If you’re single, and have lots of disposable income, then renting is the way to go.

(As long as you do your homework and find a nice, quiet upscale place to live.) As I have done for 20 years.

This whole "gotta have a house or else I’m not livin’ the “murrican Dream” is a bunch of crap. Bought into by insecure status seekers. Yeah, they have to be able to tell people they haven’t seen in 20 years at high school reunions that they own a house. ( Meaning, they are ass-deep in debt trying to own a house, most likely).

This whole “house as an investment” is crap. Sure, people have made tons of money buying houses and then selling them for a profit. But, you don’t get the money until you sell. Until then, all you do is pay taxes on money you can’t spend.

To me, that is not living. When I was a kid, we packed up and moved every 3 years, average. It was tough. Saying goodbye to classmates and friends that I have never seen or heard from again. Great for the kids, but, who cares, you made a great investment. You cleared 40 grand on your home sale. Bully for you. Buy Prozac for your kids.

People should live like they want to live, not what their financial dreams dictate how they should live.

Keep building up that equity. Keep uprooting your children for the sake of a better investment.

55

Not exactly. Interest accrued on mortgages is tax deductible. :slight_smile:

Pardon me but your bias is showing.

56

Whoopee.

Guess I’ll run out and indebt myself up to my neck so that I can deduct my interest accrued on mortgage. (Whatever that is).

Don’t need to know, don’t want to know.

And yeah, my bias is showing. I hated moving as a kid. But nowadays I hear co-workers yapping about how they sold a house for a few grand profit so they could buy a new house, not in a far-away city, to keep a job or get a better job; but ACROSS TOWN. Just for the money.

So what if their kid had to go to a new high school in their junior year.

It’s all about the money, and that is my main point. How you live should not be dictated by money. It should be “dictated” by HOW YOU REALLY WANT TO LIVE.

57

Apartment rents also tend to go up over time, as property values increase. Your mortgage payment, assuming you got a fixed-rate loan, won’t. You are less likely to get priced out of a neighborhood that you used to be able to live in if you own than you are if you rent.

I’d say you’re right about that. Home ownership has its advantages and disadvantages, just like renting. I’m not looking forward to having to deal with the handyman-type stuff myself, for example, although my recent experience with our complex management makes me think that at least I probably can’t do as badly as they are…

I agree. The main reasons I want to get a house are so I don’t have to deal with shared walls, pain-in-the-ass office staff, and rules saying I can’t get a dog or some more cats (and the pets one is the biggie for me). I’m not thinking of it in terms of an investment.

But the apartment complex owners have more motivation to go cheap at the expense of quality- they’re not going to be the ones who have to live with cheap appliances and cabinets, unlike the homeowner. If we’re talking about a house fixed up by one of those people who “flip” houses, or a new house built by a developer, they might well cheap out on appliances and such, though, for the same reason. (Neither of those is the case in my house, BTW)

58

I think home ownership makes sense if you are going to stay put for a few years. Where you may start saving money is over time. My friend’s parents have a few years left on their mortgage which is $300.00. They live in an area where to rent a house is at least $2,300.00. Over time, for them this works.

Things such as property tax and maintenance are built into the cost of renting. If it no longer becomes profitable to rent an apartment out, why would anyone do so.

I also think that you are more likely to move if you are renting than if you own. My parents stay put for 20 years in the same house. My friends parents are closing in on thirty years. Other friend’s parents moved after the kids got out of high school and they didn’t need such a large home.

I think that if you are only planning on staying for a few years than for the most part, home ownership doesn’t really make sense. You also shouldn’t buy more home than you can afford.

59

That’s what you get for working with yuppies. :wink:

Can’t it be both? I live in a 2-BR aparartment, my monthly payment (mortgage + condo fee) is about the same as what I would pay to rent a 1-BR, and I don’t have to worry about the possibility of a month-to-month lease being terminated on short notice.

60

I prefer to hire repair people directly rather than paying indirectly through rent. When you pay for repairs indirectly through your rent, the landlord always has an incentive to delay making needed repairs and to do the absolute minimum necessary to keep things barely working.

When my central air conditioning (originally installed in the 80s) failed, I had a choice between replacing a component for $350 or buying a whole new unit $2000. I took the new unit and it’s run very well for the last 5 years. For me, there’s value in having a newer, more reliable system.

Most landlords I know would have taken the initially cheaper option. What do they care if the air conditioning is more likely to break down on a hot day? What do they care if the electricity bill is higher?

But for me, the most important aspect of ownership is it gives a measure of protection against inflation. Even if the landlord is making a good return on his or her investment, he is likely to raise your rent if he thinks the market can bear it. And that sucks.