I've rented only one apartment: on-campus housing at my school.

The day I went up to the school to sign the rental agreement, I was allowed to first look at the empty unit. I really should have said "No thanks," because there were dead roaches scattered ALL OVER THE PLACE. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom...everywhere. They were on the floor, the window sills, the counters, in the sink and tub. Ugh.

However, I moved in anyway, because this was cheaper than living in the dorm that I'd been occupying for a year. The school paid the electric and water bill from my monthly rent, so this wasn't a bad deal - I knew, every month, exactly what I would owe.

The roaches weren't all dead, of course. It didn't take long before they were crawling all over everything that I'd moved in, looking for something yummy. The school told me that a pest-control service came once a month. When the guy showed up a couple of weeks later, he squirted a tiny amount of pesticide under the kitchen cabinet, then left. This obviously didn't do any good, because the roaches were still hanging around, in plain sight even with all of the lights on. (When roaches are out in daylight, you know that the problem is huge. They typically scatter when you turn on a light, but these weren't doing that. Must have been overcrowded or something.)

I went to the store and bought an armload of Combat roach baits. The roaches tore through all of it and came back for more. They were in my desk and dresser drawers...they were all over my kitchen...they were even eating the glue in my book bindings.

And, naturally, when I moved out, I brought a buttload of roaches home with me. My parents are *still* ticked off about that one. Sigh.

Right in the middle of New York. But that is to be expected. For the most part, crime, pollution, and traffic characterize large cities. So when I rented an apartment in New York, I wasn't expecting any surprises.

However, I was surprised to find rodents running loose in the apartment, and frankly, it looked like it was abandoned for years! There was an inch-thick layer of dust on everything!!! I almost puked out of disgust, no exaggeration.

Im not saying that all cities are bad. Boston is one of the cleanest cities I have visited, and the people there are really kind. But I cannot understand why people would ever wear I <3 NY shirts. I certainly do not.

I hope I helped; have a great day!!!

I've been pretty lucky in that the five apartments that I rented were all pretty decent.

The first one was fine, except for the hole in the wall under the kitchen sink that allowed our neighbor's cat to get into our apartment. It really startled me the first time the cat appeared on the back of the sofa when I thought I was alone! After several months we finally figured out we weren't just super-slow closing the front door behind us.

The second one would have been barely ok--bedroom window on a parking lot so if we'd been able to sleep in there we would have been continously woken up, but my husband and I were sleeping on the sofa bed in the living room. We helped out his grandma by taking over the lease when she was in a traffic accident while on vacation. She'd just signed the lease and couldn't get out of it but had to have surgery and live in a rehab center for nearly a year; we'd just graduated from college and needed somewhere to go. The only catch was ALL her belongings from the recent sale of her large house were crammed into this one-bedroom apartment! We had nowhere to hang our clothes or put our wedding presents. So the apartment itself wasn't too bad; it's living with all her stuff that was.

After she got out of rehab we moved into a lakefront apartment that was really very nice--but finding out one of our neighbors was on house arrest was not. Most of the neighbors were great. The ones that literally did practice with their rock band at 1 a.m. directly above us were the exception.

The next apartment was fine; we left it when I went to grad school.

The next one was married student housing, and was pretty big, but had no storage. It also had a mold problem in the ducts, which made me continually sick the entire time we lived there. I did rather enjoy hearing people practice flute and violin while I was in the bathtub, though. The flute in particular had a sort of eerie quality. And I enjoyed smelling the flavors from around the world that people were cooking for dinner.

The biggest drawback to that one was the combination of giant parking lot with super-slow elevators. After walking a good quarter of a mile from our spot to the door, we could either stand there waiting for the elevator for around 5 minutes, or walk up four flights of stairs. Not very practical while carrying several bags of groceries--traffic was so bad I'd only go grocery shopping once a week because I just didn't have time to make the trip more than once. Which meant making several trips to shlepp all the groceries upstairs.

We had one more apartment in the upstairs of an old house. It really wasn't bad at all; just tiny. After that, we bought a house.