When I was in college, I made the mistake of agreeing to share a house with a classmate. After finding things from my room out in the living room, as well as evidence of illegal activities, I rushed to find another place, and I moved.
My “apartment” was most of the first floor of a very old house. The landlord ran a group home for mentally handicapped adults, and two of them lived upstairs - they weren’t an issue, tho - they were quiet and kept to themselves. However, the back part of the house was another unit where a couple lived with their baby. They were very noisy and very dirty, and when they left (dunno if they were evicted or not) their place was sprayed for roaches, which immediately moved into my place. I was awakened one night with roaches literally crawling on me in bed. :eek:
The bathroom was carved out of a niche at the foot of what used to be the back stairs in the house. The shelves next to the tub were steps. There was no shower (I hate taking baths) but I was able to get a hand-held thingie that hooked over the tub faucet, so I could sorta shower.
Worst of all, tho, was that you could see into the basement from the apartment. As in there was a gap between the floorboards and the wall, and when the landlord left the light on in the basement, I could see down there. Honest to goodness, I don’t know how the floor didn’t just crash into the basement.
But it was cheap and I could afford it by myself. I only had to live there a year before I graduated. Granted, not as awful as some of the places described in this thread, but it was the worst I had to deal with.
Way back when I was a teacher, I stayed in a basement apartment which was the basement of someone’s house. I was paid crap and it was the only thing offered that I could afford and I was told that I was REQUIRED to live in town - though not officially. If I moved out of town I would find my contract not renewed.
I paid $100 a month furnished and I OVERPAID :(. It was horrid. Humid, smelly…and it was spiders in the Fall and crickets in the Spring. The crickets were much worse :(.
The fridge went out in January and they didn’t replace it.
I went to the Superintendent and told him I was not going to live there the next year and if they were going to fire me for it then to do it. They let me live in a town nearby
When I moved from Illinois to Lafayette Louisiana the only place I can find to start was in a group house. I had my own room, but the shared bathroom had the hot water faucet broken so there was no hot water in the entire house. No air conditioning either in August. It certainly inspired me to find a new place fast. The only upside was that no one ever came around for the little bit of rent I kind of owed. I would have happily paid for hot water.
I was going straight for the “Four Yorkshiremen” routine, but Leaffan beat me to it. My favorite one was the brown paper bag in the septic tank.
In real life, I lived in unfinished basements two different times. Well, I should say I had to sleep in the basement but had the run of the rest of the place. Both basements were damp, smelly and dark.
But the worst place I ever lived was in a rented room in a mean lady’s house. I had no money and had to wait on my first paycheck in order to get the rent to her. 21 years old and listening to someone pound on your door yelling “Pay up or get out!!” is not a good place to be. I take shameful pleasure in the fact that now that I’m her age, I have a house three times the size of hers and I don’t have to take in roomers.
Not me, but some close friends of mine - lived in a communial house with a crazy person living in the basement (he wasn’t visibly crazy when he moved in but soon stopped taking his meds and grew worse and worse). This person was in the habit of acting threatening & paranoid, plus he was a hoarder - the whole basement, which was large, became filled with junk he dragged in and he had passages and tunnels through it. The cops would come by and drag him off to the hospital every once in a while, mostly for threatening people, but he always came back. Eventually they nailed the door to the basement shut.
I’ve never really lived in any super horrible places but one summer I had a sublet in Ann Arbor. It was in a really good location and cheap, but the landlords, I would later find out, had a pretty solid reputation of skating just on the legal edge of “slumlord.”
Anyways, all the hot water and sanitary facilities worked (thank god) but the carpeting was so old and sticky and stained up with who-knows-what it literally squelched as you walked. I refused to ever have my shoes off inside the apartment.
I suppose the worst place was when I rented a doublewide 2 bedroom mobile home. It was a nice park, the my landlord was very, very strange.
It wasn’t until after the deal was done that I realized we were going to be “sharing” it–he had put up a piece of plywood in the hallway to block off the back master bedroom, and I had the rest of the place “to myself”. I ended up sleeping in the living room part of it because he watched porn all night and the plywood didn’t block the sound at all. After a couple months he told me his mother was moving in, and I was gone within a week.
When I was 18 my then-boyfriend and I lived in a big, beautiful old house that had been converted to apartments but sadly fell victim to a slumlord. Our side of the house was fine (our apartment was awesome) but the other side had rooming-house type places and wasn’t that great. One upstairs apartment had a hole in the bathroom floor and you could see right through to the kitchen in the apartment downstairs. The lady downstairs would be in her kitchen and suddenly hear “HI LINDA!” and she’d holler up, “HI CHRISTINE! You on the shitter again?”
Back in 85 I lived with my mother in a three story walkup in Uptown. The apartment consisted of two bedrooms, a frontroom, a sorta wide “hallway/dining room” of sorts, a kitchen and a bath, oh, and like 10 million roaches.
They were so bad, they would intentionally walk across the ceiling and try to land in your dinner. They were competitive I guess, and were trying to beat the other roaches to the goodies. I hunched over my dinner plate for years after that.
She would try again and again to kill them off, bombing the place with bug poison, we’d have to leave for the whole day while they died. We’d come back and she would sweep up dustpan after dustpan of dead roaches.
They would be gone for about three days, then they would return with all their new friends from next door…
Your post made me realize what a weird apartment complex my parents lived in (years ago). It was actually very nice and clean, bt there was a very strange old lady on the floor above-she played organ music all night-it reminded me of a funeral home.
I guess I’ve been lucky so far. This is only the fifth place I’ve ever lived in for more than a couple of days, and all have been quite nice. I’ve slept in a number of barely tolerable hotel rooms, though. One came with a dead rodent.
Nothing so bad as the rest of you guys, but there was that year I shared the cruddy doorless semi-2 room apartment with a woman who was slowly going insane.
It had carpet. Ish. Okay, it had astroturf. Which still managed to get bedbugs in it. I slept on a platform 5 feet above the ground in the living room/dining room/sewing room. This was my only private space, as the only door was to the bathroom. Luckily, my roommate was only 4 and a half feet tall, so the bed was out of her viewing range.
The kitchen was the hallway. No room to walk two abreast, and a refugee camp for the roaches in the building. The walls were paper thin. The people upstairs were alternately homicidal towards each other and extremely amorous. It got to the point where I could tell when she was faking. The guy downstairs screamed in Korean and burned a piece of fish every morning.
Meanwhile, the apartment caught bedbugs from the stupid neighbor and his curb furniture, and my roommate went off her meds. The last few months of that lease were very… interesting.
Do none of the places any of you have lived in have any sort of tenant protection?! No hot water, no heating and insect infestations are all pretty much illegal here, and there is a relatively easy tribunal process to get these things resolved and/or get out of a lease. Landlords here say the laws are too much in favour of tenants (I’m not quite familiar enough to comment) but damn you guys are describing some scary situations!
I’m honestly appalled; I thought our “slumlord” who divided rooms in the house to make additional bedrooms and who took a couple months to fix a broken oven was bad (the stovetop worked!)!
The obvious answer for me is: West Texas. However, as far as domiciles go, I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve never lived in a crappy house or apartment and have liked every one I’ve lived in okay. I lived in an almost literal closet at the East West Center on the U of Hawaii campus for a couple of years, and there are some who would probably think that qualifies, but even that I have very fond memories of. Plus it was free (came with the job).
In a huge house in Toronto that was divided into small apartments. I had a dark cold basement one bedroom sorry excuse for an apartment and a neighbor who was a really shitty mother to her toddler. I was 17 years old and on my own. I couldn’t wait to leave the house every morning so I could go to school and then to my job so I could pay for my cheap ass rent. Actually this memory is bringing back unpleasant thoughts so I think I will log out now.
I recall a rather bad apartment I lived in long ago, back when I was still with my mother. It had roaches (not too bad fortunately). It was poorly constructed; the fan over the oven wasn’t connected to a vent, the rain drains outside had inflow grills lower than the outflow, constant electrical problems, and there was a period of several months when every time the person in the apartment above us flushed the toilet water would come out of the ceiling and fall into our toilet. I to this day tend to twitch when I hear a toilet flush when I’m using one. Plus, the neighborhood was bad; my mother mentioned to me how she’d been complimented for her superior parenting skills since neither of her sons ever went to jail.
I was on a temporary work assignment for 6 weeks in Wilmington, NC and rented a 1 BR beach condo. The odor inside was so bad that before leaving in the a.m., I placed a container of liquid bleach in front of the a/c return vent attempting to neutralize it. Didn’t really work.
The roaches were a problem and even after extermination, remained. Some were so large, that the only way to get rid of them was to leash train them inside the unit and then coax them outside while on the leash, walk them to the beach while repeating the command, “Heel”, and set them free. I was the Pied Piper of Wilmington.
Motel in Knoxville, TN paying weekly as temp for four months. It was classic dump. A bare bulb on the ceiling, a couch that would swallow you if you sat in it, Turkish towels that had strange smell and thread-bare. It was all I could afford while trying to pay the mortgage on my house in far eastern TN. Surrounded by dealers, addicts, hookers, etc. Kept it cordial with everyone and never had problems; except for a hooker who asked to come to my room over the phone (which I was too stupid to realize at the time what was going on).
Eventually, I got an permanent job offer at the same place and moved into a rental home which was far more comfortable, but prosaic.
