They Won't Be Missed: Bad Neighbor/Bad Property Management

[LabCat]

I have been living in apartments since 12/15/00. I have had neighbors of all walks of life, races, ages, occupations, addictions, creeds, religions and sanity levels. I never had a problem with any of my neighbors. That changed in 08/09. 2 twin girls aged 18 moved upstairs. They came from another end of the state to go to nursing school, their parents were footing the bill for the rent. This is a short list of the joys of living below the 2.

#1 Incessant Screaming Fights: these 2 are case in point that being twins doesn't mean your best friends. They hate each other. I know this because at least 3 nights a week I was treated to a screeching 1hr-5hr argument and at the volume they were hitting I couldn't help but hear--every----single----word.

2# Weeknight party time: I don't mind partying neighbors. But partying on weeknights at 0200a.m with a lot of horseplay, obnoxious guests, got old fast.

3# Their trash became my trash: their cigarette butts, old homework, cigarettes boxes, broken beer bottles, and very personal medical documents would all fall into my patio and porch.

#4 Niagra falls in my laundry room: One night I heard a steady trickle of water. I thought it was rain until I looked out my patio door and saw a gusher of water coming down from their laundry room into mine. Evrything in the room was floating. I run upstairs and to be greeted by sobbing and screaming. They had somehow broken the valve to their water hose and they couldn't shut off the water. A plumber had to be called to shut off the water to the whole building, so he could fix the valve.


#5 Niagra falls in my laundry room redux: 3 days later again I hear the rush of water. I look outside and here we go again. I go upstairs. This time it's because they didn't put the hose on the washer correctly. My laundry room is afloat.....again. It only takes 10hrs of 90 degree heat to start the rapid spread of massive mold in my poor laundry room.

#6 Cell phone keep-away incident: At 0300 am I hear a herd of people go upstairs. Then I hear a very irate girl screaming on the upstairs porch "Give me my phone back". Her friends join her in the yelling. The 2 won't come to the door. The yelling gets louder and louder. My Mom is staying with me and has a lot of health issues: she has a lot of trouble getting any sleep. At this point they wake Mom up. Mom goes outside, goes upstairs and coldly says through the door " GIVE THE PHONE BACK NOW". A few seconds later a cell phone is tossed over the balcony.

#7 Rude and catty to all but a few: Mom and I are fat and weird and really don't expect a lot of friendliness from people. But these 2 weren't just rude to us: they were rude to most of our other neighbors. They were only freindly to people that were their age and their "crowd" everybody else could expect forced civility at best.

#8 Patio door lock out fun: One twin would lock the other out on the patio. The other would scream their head off, the offending twin would leave. Stuck twin would hail a passerby to call the office for an unlock. Or they would just shimmy down the 2 story patio pole with a lot of loud cursing.


Property management suck: after the massive water damage and mold to my laundry room I thought that they would gut and redo. Nope I got bleach spray down and that was it. Their reasoning: the room is outside we're not obligated to fix it.

My neighbors and I complained repeatedly about the twins behavior. In the beginning property manager would call the parents and wouldn't talk to the twins. Then the calls to the police were made. The manager said she had to have 3 police reports before she could make them leave. She had 2 reports, but by this time people had given up. I think if the manager had treated these 2 like adults from the beginning things would have been different.

[emax4]

I had a couple living above me in my old place. They fought occasionally here and there. At first I thought it was funny, but then it got tiring. At some point I was even depressed about it and wanted to say, "just both of you.. just both go your own separate ways. You obviously can't ever get along.. Just move on.." I hesitated but eventually I had to call the cops on them on two occasions.

[Pezzle]

Property management suck: after the massive water damage and mold to my laundry room I thought that they would gut and redo. Nope I got bleach spray down and that was it. Their reasoning: the room is outside we're not obligated to fix it.

I'm curious about the legality of that. Black mold especially can be deadly even to those who do not have an overt allergy to molds. For me, this would be a hazardous living condition, as I'd constantly have to use my inhaler just to do my laundry and would be snorting enough flonase to fill a horse's anus just to keep from crippling sinus headaches.

They'd have gotten the hammer brought down on them for that one with me..

F mold.

[Sapphire Silk]

Yeah, I've had similar nightmare neighbors in apartments. This is why I will NEVER live in an apartment again.

Had one neighbor who moved to the complex for high speed internet access (she normally lived in the mountains where all she had was dial up) so she could go to school online. She was OK . . . her son was a dick. He woke me up one night playing head banger music with the volume cranked at 3 AM! When I banged on the door to complain, he was like, "Oh, I'm bothering you?"

Mom was home with a migraine, but is so used to his behavior that it didn't occur to her to put a stop to it.

I had to endure this for a year. It never got better. The cops treated it as a land lord problem. The manager was fine with canceling the lease but said the management company wouldn't let her (I actually believe her, we were on very good terms as I was a long term resident).

Had another new neighbor move in to another complex I was living in. Met him and his buddies at the apartment pool. He was the only one who lived there, but his friends pretty much dominated the place. Complex rules were up to four guests. He had about 10 routinely.

One night he had a big party. Very loud, very drunken. He and his pals got into an argument with another resident over the noise. Jerk's buddies were all white, the other resident was black. They had nailed his car with some kind of foam, and he didn't like it to much (wonder why). When the other resident threatened to kick some ass and chased them around with a bat, they regrouped and went stomping around the parking lot screaming, "Seig Heil! Seig Heil!"

That was enough for me. I called the cops.

Heard some banging outside my apartment door. Looked through the peephole and saw one of the punks stealing the fire extinguisher.

I blew my cool. I jerked open my apartment door without thinking, yelling, "You son of a bitch!"

Punk ran scared into his buddy's apartment and slammed the door. I went back into my apartment and called the cops back.

The cops later asked me to identify the punk, which I did. He went away in handcuffs.

The guy who actually had the lease got away with just a warning, because he claimed he never went outside. But his friends were perma banned. He moved out a year later when management declined to renew his lease.

I realized after that opening the door during all that mess wasn't the smartest thing to do.

Funny thing about it was, I forgot to removed the chain, and pulled it out of the door frame

[retailsweetie]

I just finished an academic year of living in what may have been the worst dorm ever. I feel for you, LabCat.

[Sunshine]

ohhh *shudders* flashbacks of apt living. so glad i dont do that anymore. i feel for ya

[blas]

We just got rid of some bad Riff Raff that had been going on in these buildings for several months. There was a squatter problem, that I posted in Fratching about (the milder version: a few tenants had boyfriends/friends not on the lease permanently living with them and it was causing problems).

The Riff Raff can be summed up as....there is a girl, who is the niece of the woman who actually owns the property management company (the husband passed away some years ago, she is quite old herself, so her son runs the show and appointed the maintenance guys to also help with establishing rules/boundaries and screening tenants). This girl is what I would call developmentally disabled.....similar to Sheriff the neighborhood annoyance. Not all there mentally, but well enough off to be able to live alone, work, etc etc. There's a few tenants like that here who have connections to the owner of the company, and I assume they get discounted rent or live here so that their family doesn't have to worry about their safety and whatnot.

This girl all of a sudden took a turn for the worse and starting hanging out with people "Across the street". We've called it Riff Raff because there's always been an established "No No Zone", regarding people from across the street's building coming here. That building is owned by someone else and the people tend to be very shady, drug dealers, and in general, nogoodnicks. But this girl crossed the line and all of a sudden, people from across the street were coming over here any old time of day, and no one here even knew belonged here and who didn't.

Most of these people take the bus instead of driving, and the bus stop became a dangerous place because of the noise, verbal altercations, and general rambunctious behavior of that girl and her friends.

Then it seemed the property management company quit caring and started renting to whomever the hell filled out an app.....and a family of real shady winners moved in, their daughter started hanging with the one girl, and that brought even more people from across the street over here.

One day in particular, I came home from my parents on a Sunday evening, sat down to some fast food, went out for a smoke, and all of a sudden, the two girls were in my stairway just talking and bsing. Um, NO. You don't live here. Get the fuck out. I told my neighbor, because he is more authorative and not as meek as I am about people like that, and he complained to the maintenance guy the next time he saw them. He said "They don't belong in our stairway. They can hang out in their own stairways."

All kinds of complaints from everyone in these buildings poured in. When I went to pay my rent, I complained twice about the Riff Raff. When I was still on 3rd shift, I would be having a smoke before work around 9:30 pm, when the last bus picks people up at the end of the block, and there was screaming and it sounded like a damn riot or a party. This was almost a NIGHTLY occurance when they'd get on the bus or off. Since it was the last bus, they had to find their own way back later, and I was told by my neighbors that they'd come back home later in the night just as loud as they'd been before.

Despite the fact that the sickos across the street have THEIR OWN pool, they started using ours because either the special girl or her friend told them they could, or they just felt they could because now the barrier had been broken and they were coming over here regularly. Since the pool opened, there would be random people no one even knew in the pool at any times. Even though the gate is locked and no one is supposed to be in the pool at night, I would see people hop over the gate and hang out in there anyway after dark. It didn't take long for complaints to go in.

Backtrack a bit......special girl actually made copies of her keys (AGAINST lease rules!) and gave them to these people. Some of these people were semi-living at her place as well, along with the squatter problem we had with another tenant in the building across from that one.

Her family was irate over the keys, so they gave her a warning. That was it. Out of all the complaints. They made her give the keys back and told her not to let anyone from across the street over again because it was making everyone here feel uncomfortable.

She didn't stop. This went on until last weekend, Saturday. I missed the incident because I was at my parents' house catsitting, but my neighbor told me it happened just minutes after I left.

Special girl, her friend, and the Riff Raff people were in the pool and one of the guys with them chased special girl to her apartment and tried to sexually assault her at her doorstep! The cops were called, and whenever that happens, a caretaker is supposed to call the landlord. I'm not sure if it's a law or just policy here, but the son of the lady who owns the properties came over, and he FINALLY said that it was the last damn straw. FINALLY.

They evicted her, and the tenant across the street who had the squatters.

I was probably sleeping when it happened, because I never saw her stuff get moved out, but the other morning before I went to bed, I was outside and saw someone pick up special girl and drive her away. She looked actually heartbroken that she had to leave.'

But thank GOD it's over. You would have thought with all the stories I've told of this place that something like that would have been nipped in the bud forever ago. Nope. It wasn't until people started threatening to move out and break their leases (not to mention there were OTHER police showing up events) that they finally got rid of her.

[Syriilord]

Heh. One year at college, I was sharing a house with 6 other people, all complete strangers to me when I first moved in. (Got to know them a bit better during the year) They were all right overall, but they had a tendancy to have get-togethers with friends in the evenings with music, drinking, loud talking etc. I'm not exactly a party kind of guy and tend to start running out of steam about midnight / 1 am, so I would be going to bed while they were still loling it up.

Anyway, long story short; that year marked the beginning of my habit of going to sleep while listening to my mp3 player ¬_¬

[greensinestro]

Ah, yes, the fun of apartment living and the shitty neighbors you have around you.

I had one below me who was so disruptive, I had to call the police several times on her. One morning, 330am, she decided to vacuum her floors. No big deal, except for the loud, booming rap music complete with 200 watt woofers and speakers. It was "ba-boom! ba-boom!" for about twenty minutes until I called the cops.

Then, the next night, this same lady, about 4am, was yelling at the top of her lungs at someone on the phone. "Listen, mother fucker, I fucking know what I'm talking about. What? You fucking better stop!" I actually had to call the cops twice in a two hour period. They came once, she stopped for about fifteen minutes, then started up again.

The next night, she was back to her rap music, this time at 2am. I had had enough at this point where I again called the cops, and left what I thought was a polite note on her door. With the note, she ran to management and said I was harassing her. Apparently, it's harassment when you're trying to sleep and then have to call the cops several times on someone disturbing the peace like this. Then, when you politely ask someone to be considerate of their neighbors, that's harassment, too.

Thankfully, this woman moved out before too long. A nice couple moved in after her, and we got along fine.