Back around 1960 a friend and I decided to share an apartment not too far from the Penn campus where I was a grad student. Summer and early fall were fine. Then the heating season started and we were awakened around 5 or 6 every morning by the incredible clanking steam heat coming on. After a couple weeks of this we just moved out. I went back to living at my parents’ while he got another apartment somewhere.
the tent in the desert we lived in illegally for a month or so after the fighting between mom and the SOB (very long story) got us kicked out of the trailer park
He was there first, I guess I invaded his space. He kept getting back in.
My first place in the states. I moved to the UK to work for a small computer games company in Reno Nevada. The boundless resouces of the company they could splurge on their new employees you got a month renting a compact car and staying in the height of luxury that was “Extended Stay America” hotel.
Really awful low-end corporate hotel on the outskirts of Reno Nevada, none of which is particularly nice but the outskirts of town being particularly soulless. Constant noise of one or other families arguing in one of the nearby rooms.
If it wasn’t for the fact you were 25 minutes drive from a ski resort, I would not have stayed in the US 
You were probably close to me. I lived on Woodland Avenue, S 44th st., and Osage Avenue while in West Philadelphia. How about you?
I’d say the shittiest place I’ve ever lived was a small 1BR in Waltham, MA. Waltham itself is a decent enough suburb of Boston. But my apartment was really shitty. I didn’t really care though. It was a) cheap, b) conveniently located to work, school, some bars and restaurants, my friends, Boston, the T, and major highways c) had parking and d) was month to month.
But man was that place a shithole.
Las Vegas
My second apartment in New York City, I lived there from 1981 to 1984. It was on the second floor of a six floor walk up. The only good thing about the the building was the neighborhood, I was on 53rd St between 2nd and 3rd Ave.
It was a railroad flat in a dilapidated building. You entered into the kitchen and walked through the two “bedrooms” to get to the living room. The living room was the only room with windows that did not look out onto an air shaft. I shared it with a series of roommates.
The “bedrooms weren’t much more than a wide space in the hallway, with a doorless arch between them. We put loft beds in those rooms, and used the space under the beds as a closet. There was absolutely zero privacy in the bedrooms. It only worked because we were very young with active lives and hardly ever at home.
The bathroom was as old and run down as the rest of the place, with a toilet with a tank near the ceiling and a pull chain. Unlike most railroad flats of that generation, the bathtub was actually in the bathroom and not in the kitchen, however they had to cut the toilet seat to make the tub fit. Also, we had one of the two “good” front apartments on the floor, the other two apartments, in the back of the building, didn’t even have private bathrooms, there was a shared bathroom in the hall for the two apartments. And the place was disgustingly roach infested.
In late 1983, the roach infestation got worse and we seemed to have fewer neighbors. It appeared that they were not renting apartments as they became vacant - this was a sign that they wanted to empty the building. It is important to note that the building was rent-stabilized, meaning that the landlord was required to renew your lease upon request and the rent increases were limited.
Som even though I was planning on moving, I decided to request my renewal lease to see what would happen. Sure enough, I was contacted by an attorney who offered my a payout of 10K not to renew, plus I got to stop paying rent immediately and I could take up to 3 months to move. Apparently, they were looking to empty the building so they could combine units and renovate.
I took the money and moved. I believe the plans for renovation were put on hold after the 1987 market crash, although I’m assuming it was eventually renovated. Even 30 years later, it still looked the same on the outside, though.
Shitty college-adjacent apartments in Baton Rouge, LA. Around 2001-2002. I remember that we rented a 2 BR apartment for $450 per month.
The apartment I lived in during my senior year of college and grad school.
Due to the way the apartments were arranged in the building, there was only one window in my entire apartment, in the front room (which was both living room and kitchen). The bedroom had no windows at all. I’m sure that would never meet modern fire codes, but I assume it must have been “grandfathered”. There was a (dirty) skylight in the bedroom, the sole source of natural light in there.
And the walls were so thin I could hear everything my neighbors did. Watching TV, having sex, farting. I am not making that last one up; I could literally hear my neighbor fart.
The streets of Seattle during the winter back in the early 80’s.
As a grad student I lived with two other students in a ramshackle apartment building just a few feet from the train tracks in Somerville, MA, a.k.a. “Slummerville.” The tenant before us had apparently never used the gas oven, because the first time I turned it on, hundreds of roaches that had apparently been enjoying uninterrupted warmth from the pilot light came streaming out and ran all over the kitchen.
Shortly thereafter I made a humorous drawing of a scurrying roach with a knife poised over it, labeled DEATH TO FACIST ROACHES, and taped it up in the kitchen. My very proper preppie mother about had a heart attack the one time she visited.
On the sidewalk next to the traintracks, someone had spray painted in huge letters, “A woman was raped here.” That was a well-meaning gesture and probably did encourage me to be cautious. Still, it was a little disturbing/depressing to walk over that message every time I came home from class.
For about 18 months in 2002-2003 my wife and I lived in a ramshackle double wide in the country. It must’ve been one of the first mobile homes built: it still had the trailer hitch and license plate on it and was clearly made from the same stuff beer cans are made from today.
When we moved it it was… not trashed, exactly, but filled with trash. The previous tenants had left probably a good-sized truckload of random household junk in the place. We had to haul it all away and clean it before we moved in. They also left an old ca. 1970 GMC pickup in the yard, complete with signed title. I gave that to my brother.
Several of the appliances (dishwasher, fridge) didn’t work. The landlord replaced the fridge with a old Montgomery Ward branded fridge with a bright yellow Jesus bumper sticker on the front. It barely worked; we could not buy ice cream because the freezer wasn’t cold enough to keep it from going soupy. Milk didn’t last long in the fridge.
One day, about a month after we had moved in, I looked down and saw that, I thought, I had spilled coffee grounds on my leg. Upon closer inspection I realized they were fleas: thousands of them. We bug-bombed the house that very day.
A couple of months after we moved in the water quit working. The landlord was just some buddy of the owner and didn’t know much about the place, but of course I called him up and told him about the problem. He came out and looked at it and couldn’t figure out what was going on. Two days later – two days! – he finally gets the bright idea to call the previous tenants. Turns out the water system, which of course was a well/pressure tank setup, was on a seperate power meter which nobody knew about. So we had to pay 2½ months of overdue power bills that I had known nothing about just to get the power, and our water, turned back on.
When we moved out we found water and mildew stains on the bottom of some of the furniture, furniture that wasn’t even against an outside wall.
The laundry was an afterthought, just a cold water hose threaded into a bedroom closet and a 4" hole drilled into the floor. I actually crawled under the house and routed some vent pipe to an outside wall and installed a proper vent cover. We still only had cold water to wash with.
It was out in the country at the end of a 2 mile long private road. Nobody, but nobody ever came down that road to our place so we never locked it. We also never locked it because we we never given a key and the sliding glass door wasn’t lockable anyway.
That private road went through someone else’s front yard a mile up. Not just adjacent, but actually through. It was incredibly awkward at first driving through someone’s yard but we got used to it.
The only good thing was the location: complete and total privacy, the only people that knew we were there were neighbors and people visiting us specifically.
Too many to list. 
One apartment had no insulation between the floors, and when the people below me had their ceiling light on…my carpet above it got hot. That place was 107F degrees in my living room on summer nights. I’d get a popsicle from the freezer and before I could get to my chair to eat it, the popsicle had melted.
Then there was the place with the roach infestation. They were swarming
in the sink where I’d wash my face. My stereo speakers and several appliances had wall-to-wall roaches inside them.
And my first apartment had an unvented heater…the kind that can cause brain damage.
I spent 11 months in Montana. I don’t know about “sh*ty”…it was just boring.
I have a very high discomfort tolerance, so I’m good pretty much anywhere (I’ve lived for three months in a war-torn town in Croatia with no showering/bathing facilities – we washed up once a week at another residence – and indoor temps in the low 50s when I lived there, but I was mentally prepared for it, so it didn’t bother me.) But when I was in college, we rented the back of this old house with apparently confetti for insulation, and I had the small room with a giant window that took up like 50% of the west wall. I was absolutely miserable in the winter, sleeping curled up in the fetal position with several blankets over me and shivering. Why I didn’t get a space heater, I don’t know. Maybe I had one, but I was still absolutely miserable, both physically and mentally. My mind was just caught unprepared about living in this affluent suburb in this shitty, shitty domicile. Even though the Croatian experience was objectively more difficult, I found the college house much more challenging to endure.
Our tiny rental house in South Dakota had such an efficient heating system (single large vent in the living room) that icicles formed on the inside of windows during severe winter cold snaps. The plumbing was semi-medieval. Our neighbor on one side imported snakes which he trapped down by the Missouri River, releasing them into his yard to kill varmints. The neighbors on the other side left deer carcass parts in their yard and carried unconscious family members into the house at odd hours. One of our dogs developed a bad case of fleas, which decided I was even tastier and inflicted such misery that I wound up outdoors at night in a sleeping bag to escape them. It was a step up from our apartment though.
Good times.
The worst place I lived in for only a few months, and its only fault was that it was tiny for 3 people. It had a shed that we cleaned out with some interesting 19th century books, which my mom threw out because they were literally falling apart - I didn’t want them for their worth, I wanted them for their novelty!
The worst room I lived in was when I moved back in with my mom after I graduated college, she had rented a house that had a spare room that was about the size of a small bedroom, but which had been used as a utility room at one point and still had a dryer vent that was open to the air - not connected to anything. It was even worse for a few months when my brother also shared the room with me when he went to college before he got tired of the commute. But the bad part of the room was not the smallness, it was the frogs that occasionally jumped in through the vent tube during the night and couldn’t get out and would eventually jump on my while I was sleeping. I don’t know why I didn’t plug that hole at some point.
Anyone else looking at my first place in the 70’s would think, ‘what. a. dump!’ - though I liked it well enough…I lived at home with my dysfunctional family, well into my 20’s, in their fully furnished basement. I had a boyfriend who came to visit, and where else but in my ‘suite’ . Which drove my mother nuts, so I had to get out of there… A flat above an old city house was made available to me for $135 a month!!! So, in I moved. it was sparsely furnished, newly painted, bug free, upstairs from where a family lived. I had a galley kitchen, a real fire trap - sink, ancient gas stove I never dared use, ancient refrigerator, tin storage pantry. The only other exit was a window at the end of the 3 foot wide space in the kitchen where I suppose I could jump from the second floor. No bueno!.. There was a tin shower, tiny sink and toilet in the tiny bathroom, and a small separate bedroom crammed with big old furniture, but I slept in the living room mostly on my little couch. I had an old overstuffed chair, a tv, stereo. Decorated as best I could in 70’s style, I was all set! It was freezing cold in winter and like an oven in the summer, but for $135 a month, I stayed there about 3 years. Then the family said they needed more room and I would have to move. The place was a cheap, grubby poor-person’s fire trap. But I had fun, and it was close to downtown where I worked.
My worst was a nice rented bedroom in a nice farmhouse on a beautiful lot with a small pond. It was the home of a fairly young couple.
Her father was bedridden and incontinent due to a severe stroke, and his sickroom absolutely reeked of his soiled diapers. My room was a smaller room off of his sickroom and only accessible through it, and my room reeked of diapers too.
The husband imagined himself a soldier of fortune, wore a green beret, and was a dedicated gun nut and martial arts enthusiast. He was always in camouflage with a big knife strapped around his leg.
Just to complicate things, the wife was extremely attractive.