I spent a year living in a nightmare Phoenix apartment. Here’s what I learned

My time living in a nightmare Phoenix apartment—complete with cockroaches and disruptive neighbors—taught me the true cost of staying put. 

This story first appeared in Rent Check PHX, a biweekly newsletter made for Phoenix renters, written by someone who’s lived it. Sign up for it here.

It’s the fall of 2019. I’m living in an apartment in central Phoenix with my college roommate, and I’m ready to move in with my partner of four years.

He and I start looking at apartments, and we find a complex in Arcadia that seems to check our boxes—something affordable in a nice, walkable area. We figure that even if the unit we get is small, we’ll spend most of our time at nearby restaurants and coffee shops. 

We tour a unit, and everything seems fine. The complex’s pool is big and clean, the apartment is decently up-to-date, and residents smile at us in the hallway. We sign a one-year lease for a one-bed, one-bath at about $1,200 a month. 

But not long after we move in, the cracks begin to show—and soon we’re questioning whether we should end our misery and spend over $1,000 to break our lease. Here’s what went wrong. 

The COVID-19 pandemic

OK, this isn’t the complex’s fault. But as I stated earlier, we largely picked our apartment for its proximity to nearby businesses. This mattered much less once COVID-19 cases began increasing in March 2020, prompting lockdowns and social distancing.

So not only did we have to deal with everything below—but we had nowhere else to go.  

The cockroaches

When we first moved into this apartment, there weren’t any signs of cockroaches. But as fall and winter turned into a warmer spring—the start of peak cockroach activity in Arizona, and the time COVID lockdowns began—we began to notice a couple bugs here and there. We made sure to kill and flush them down the toilet. But over time, more and more started appearing. We also started noticing weird brown specks around the apartment—which we learned were egg casings. 

The situation quickly spiraled out of control. We found cockroach legs in our flour (yes, really) and egg casings in our produce basket. When my partner turned on the lights to leave for work at 4 a.m., he would see hundreds (his words, not mine) of cockroaches on our kitchen floor scatter away. It didn’t feel safe to cook or store food in our home, but the pandemic limited our options to eat out. Not only did the roaches make me feel sick to my stomach and constantly on edge, but I’m also allergic to them, so I worried how their presence was impacting my health. 

We brought the problem up many times to management, who largely shrugged it off. They sent someone to put traps in our apartment, and later someone to do a more intensive spray. This involved packing up all our stuff and staying with my partner’s parents for a day, which was not ideal when we were trying to reduce our risk of COVID-19. 

But this was a big complex with many units in one building—and one-off sprays were not going to address the much larger issue, especially when we didn’t know if other people were keeping their units clean from trash and food waste. 

The neighbors

While I lived at this complex, the police were called to almost every unit on our floor. No, seriously. Some instances were for domestic violence, while some were unknown—in one instance, we saw a unit’s doorway covered in caution tape while an officer stood guard outside. 

The neighbors across from us and another down the hall got into a dispute that escalated into verbal abuse and vandalism: A woman became convinced that a couple owed her $6, so she would stand outside of their unit banging on the door with her cane—which, with the thin walls, we heard loud and clear. When that didn’t work after multiple days, she threw what looked like bleach on the floor in front of their door. After the police came and asked what I knew about what was going on, the woman started shouting crude names at me whenever she saw me. 

The constant chaos and frequent yelling was really difficult to deal with, especially when we were stuck with nowhere else to go. I worried about us becoming targets of worse abuse, and of the violence around us escalating—which left me incredibly tense every time I left or came home.

And my fears weren’t unfounded. About half a year after we moved out, a man armed with a sharp object barricaded himself and three other people inside an apartment in the complex. Ten people, including six police officers, ended up being hospitalized from the incident. 

What I learned

So what did I learn after a year of living in this nightmare? The main thing is this: We should have broken our lease.

It would have cost a hefty price—typically one to two months of rent plus other fees—but we should have done it for our own sanity, especially during a pandemic. We ran the numbers over and over, but we kept deciding that we could stick it out just a little longer. In retrospect, I wish I had valued our mental and physical health more than our desire to save money. 

That experience also taught me to avoid big apartment complexes moving forward. With an issue as pervasive as cockroaches, it’s much easier to take care of them if you only have a few units versus hundreds. I’ve also had better experiences with management and neighbors in smaller living situations (eight to 11 units), but that isn’t the case for everybody. I do think you’re less likely to be treated like just a number in smaller complexes, though. 

I feel very grateful that my current renting experience has been nothing like this one, knock on wood. And now I know what to do if it were to ever happen again: Get the **** out.

MORE: How a Phoenix litter-lifting group helped me feel more connected to my neighbors