COCKROACHES!!!!! Living here was one of the worst decisions I have ever made. My SO and I moved to the area after we graduated college, so we could only do one visit before we moved in. The unit they showed us was not the unit we got. The day after moving into the apartment my husband woke up to a cockroach crawling on his face. He understandably complained to management, who put us on the exterminator every two weeks list. The exterminator did not seem to have any kind of formal training and were not safe to have in your home. Some of them were great, but many were not. One I watched spray a crack in our kitchen and watched all of the poison fall onto our clean dishes in the sink and coat our counters and food prep area. Another sprayed a little on the floor and left us with a tube of unknown cockroach poison and said in 2 weeks to put that in our cabinets and left. I was confused because they were supposed to be coming every 2 weeks, but we did not get another visit from the exterminator until we went and complained that they weren't coming to our unit.
When I say crack in the kitchen, I should say one of the many places that the walls/cabinet/floors that did not touch anything. There was a large gap between our counter and the cabinet below that was about 1/2 and inch wide, wide enough for cockroaches. Any cabinet in the house there was a gap like this where it did not connect with the wall properly. This is probably because the whole building was a slope. The middle of the house was the highest, then everything sloped down and away from that point, so you could not put anything round (pencil, orange, art supplies) down without it rolling away from you. Also, we live in a back unit, that faced a separate parking lot, which was very convenient if you did not have to check the mail. The paths around the building were treacherous at best, one side there is 4-6 large stones that you can step on, then they just end. No walk way, just a large ditch with some stones.
In addition to this it was clear that the building had serious foundation issues because large cracks were already present in our apartment when we moved in, but after a bad rain storm, the building shifted, and the cracks got way worse (in the living room there was a crack, after the flooding the crack went up, into the ceiling, through the ceiling into the kitchen, then from the ceiling in the kitchen to the floor, the crack was about 1/8-1/6 inch wide, and the wall looked as if it would fall over).
This and the unexpected rain shower we got from our upstairs neighbor point to how neglectful the maintenance people were, and how indifferent the management were the entire time we live there. One night we were quietly enjoying our evening, when one of our light fixtures began to drip, until the light fixture filling with water and pouring water onto the floor, and the rest of the light fixtures in the room started dripping. We went and told our up stairs neighbor that his apartment was leaking, and that we need emergency maintenance. He called it in. After 30 minutes of waiting for emergency maintenance (all of my largest pots and pans had filled up with water several times) we saw them pull up to another building and escorted them over. The maintenance men who responded looked at the problem and proceeded upstairs to fix it, after they told us a hilarious story about how earlier that week someone else in the complex had been spraying bleach on the mold growing in their bathroom, until one day the tub from the floor above fell through the floor into his bathroom. The maintenance people told us that no one was reporting it, but when we talked to our neighbors they all complained that they couldn't get anything in their units fixed. Once they stopped the leak we never hear anything else about it. No one came to follow up on water damage, look for mold, nothing. After this, our neighbor beside us was kicked out of his apartment that he'd lived in for 8 years because they had to remodel it. I'm not sure if it is standard practice to smoke in an apartment while remodeling it, but the person that remodeled the apartment worked 12+ hour days, and chain smoked while he worked in the apartment beside us. This was after we had lived in the apartment 8-10 months, so we had gotten used to the cockroaches, I averaged killing 6 a morning before I left for work, then would kill 6-12 more between getting home from work and going to bed. While the remodeling was happening my record was 17 cockroaches in 15 minutes, I was killing cockroaches of every size pretty much constantly as many as 40 a day, there was no containment, no extra spraying (they were between exterminators so we couldn't have them spray at all during the 2 weeks that they were remodeling), nothing except what everyone told us "bugs are just something you have to live with in Texas".
I would, on purely safety and human health grounds urge anyone not to move here. read more
