What is the worst experience you had living in apartment or condo community

the worst apartment “community” to live in is definitely O block.

I do not want to be ignorant nor a racist but latinos + speaker phones + thin walls & hallways.

I've had a few situations over the years I'd almost managed to forget about but was reminded of when reading others' stories on this thread.

Took an off-campus apartment in the Houston area for one year in college with 3 teammates. We had other teammates in a unit in the building across from ours. In that unit was a couple (m & f) of teammates from Norway or Finland, both throwers. Also in there with them was a multis guy from Albuquerque who had moved in with his girlfriend from back home but she left part way into the semester. Anyway, at one point the thrower couple went to a meet (might have been early during indoor season) and the multi guy didn't go. So the multi guy decides to go party with the volleyball team Saturday night and apparently he liked to drink really hard. Some volleyball girls dropped him off after the party. The thrower couple get home really early Sunday morning coming back from that meet, walk into their room and find multi guy passed out on their bed and the mattress soaked through with urine. Coach came over later on Sunday with his pickup and took their mattress to the car wash to spray out the urine. I seem to recall the multi guy was back home in Albuquerque by outdoor season.

I lived in an apartment house (old house, added onto and split into about half a dozen apartments) 3/1 for a year after college with a couple of roommates. It was a cool location but and old, POS building. Uninsulated, dingy kitchen, single-pane windows, etc. One of the roommates was a guard at the county jail and in his spare time was an amateur jiu-jitsu/MMA guy. He was probably 5'5" and 170+ lbs. Jacked with lots of black tattoos all over and a shaved head. Sweetheart of a guy but had issues relating to his upbringing. He told me when I moved in that if anyone messed with me to let him know and he'd help take care of it. I remember one night the students living below our bedroom windows were partying and I put on a fan to drown out the din. Dude gets home a little later, knocks on my door to ask me if the noise is bothering me. I say yeah, so he pulls off his shirt and rolls down there, knocks on the door, and requests that they knock off the noise. The sketchy thing, though, was that when I came back from going home for the holidays, his girlfriend had moved in without notice or discussion. She was pretty cool, former pro MTBer so the other roommate and I didn't really mind. He did it so she could pay his portion of the rent and he could quit his job to train full time and teach at the jiu-jitsu gym. I went to one of his bouts, but he was up against a guy with a much longer reach and he got pummeled and was bleeding from the face before he could even get the guy to the ground.

We also had a really shady landlord. No surprise, since the place was close to falling apart. Well, one morning (in winter) we find out someone had smashed windows on my car and my roommate's girlfriend's car. We reported it to police and to the landlord. The landlord's response, and I quote, "it was probably just bored kids vandalizing." When we told him we'd reported it to police, the story changed. He said he'd sent his property manager around to check up on abandoned vehicles on the property. Didn't make sense to us because he could have just asked residents to report their license plates to him, which I remembered putting on the lease. So my roommate decided to withhold rent until the landlord fixed what he'd broken. I supported him in principle, but my other roommate and I didn't want to lose our deposit over this. So right before our lease was up we escorted him to the landlord's office and got them to come to terms. And the landlord paid for someone to come replace the broken window on my car.

Next, after that place I moved to a 2/1 basement apartment under a house. The house was a single lease and the guy renting the house sublet the basement apartment. Mostly had decent roommates brought in by the housemate, who made his living DJing at a strip club and had his young son living in the house part-time. The first one was a welder who loved Mike Savage's show and guns. We got along fine though I got a little alarmed when I noticed he'd left his pistol sitting on his bed with the door open, because the little kid could have got ahold of it. That guy found a wife in Mexico when he was down there working on a contract and moved out. Then there was a hot chick who was nice enough and quiet. However, apparently she had a guy stalking her who tried to break in through her window well late one night. My other housemates and I ran outside with flashlights trying to catch whoever it was, to no avail. She went and stayed with a friend and then moved out shortly after that. Then there was the roommate to end all roommates for me. He was the acquaintance of a housemate who lived upstairs, they both worked at the campus post office at the local U. This guy was one of those early gamer guys, he played video games loudly and constantly in his free time and would make money by selling aspects relevant to the game on eBay. He was also a dirty pothead with wild mood swings. Any attempted conversation mentioning the kitchen sink left full of dirty dishes or any other civil request invariably escalated into him raising his voice and slamming a door. I asked the housemate to talk with him, find someone else for that room, whatever. Pothead had also lost his job at the PO due to his combative attitude. I gave my housemate a couple months to work it out. In that time, I realized I'd only signed a lease for the first year and this was now year three. When things didn't improve at all, I went and found a place to live solo and gave my housemate a month's notice. He was vocally annoyed with me and I retorted that it wasn't a livable situation for me and since he wouldn't do anything about it then I would. Turns out, the owners decided to sell the house shortly after that so everyone was kicked out anyway.

Finally, I had an efficiency near downtown that was in a location I loved for running and for going out. Had a lot of fun and drunken nights living there. When I moved in, the unit next door was empty. However, after neighbors moved in a few months later, in late fall I started seeing evidence of and then hearing/seeing mice in my place. They weren't in there at all the previous winter. We shared walls and there was clearly some conduit that the mice could transit through between our units. I never saw any evidence that they got into my food, fortunately. I bought a live trap to set up at night. When the trap was tripped, I would take a walk several blocks away with the live trap and let them out at an empty lot, a park, or in a school yard. I wound up catching over a dozen mice. There must have been a nest of them next door and food routinely left where they could access. I was glad to move out of there when I moved in with my girlfriend.

I lived in a fairly nice apartment complex in Austin, Texas about 10 years ago, right before the population blew up. Anyway, I lived in the 2nd floor of a 3 level building. The top floor was a woman in her late 20’s addicted to cocaine. She’d go out every single night, then come home at 2am after he bars closed. The floors were really nice wood floors in our units. She had a roller chair that she would go back and forth over the floor on until about 6am, when she would presumably fall asleep. The unit below me was a hardcore pothead, but we were not allowed to smoke in our units. He would open his back window and put a box fan pointing out and blow the smoke out that way. It would get carried up into our unit. If we left a window open at night or didn’t close our sliding back door closed all the way, our unit would literally fill up with the smoke. Twice we had to get our carpets shampooed.
The front office couldn’t do anything, so we left as soon as we were able. It was a nightmare 12 months.

It's not racist. I've had this experience as well. Lived next to an international Hispanic student my first year in college. He'd walk around the halls that had really thin walls on speakerphone, literally sit outside his room (basically in front of my door) or leave his door open and have conversations loudly until 12AM.

He was by far the worst person I've been next to though. the next year I had different neighbors in my dorm (a quad), half of whom were Hispanic (American, not international: one Cuban, one Mexican) and they were good.

Noise and odor pollution are a crime, just like any other property crime.

As for being in a condo complex, it's the HOA's that keep on increasing. Mine are currently at $550 a month which is about standard for the area where I live. Usually they increase by 5% each year except for this past year when they went up by 10%. I don't really get much for that and in the last five years we have also had some other additional assessments to make our financial reserves "look good" as they say. Luckily my condo is paid off and in about two years I will be selling it.