Moving into a Roach-Infested Apartment - Forest Hills Apartment Homes, Wilmington NC Review

Prepare yourself for a completely disgusting review of Forest Hills Apartment Homes located in Wilmington, North Carolina. 

Giant cockroach living under where our oven once was

Prelude - Discovering Forest Hills Apartment Homes

My wife and I are in our twenties. We have lived in a couple other apartments before. One townhouse and two others in the typical apartment building style (3-story stacked design). In early 2022, we decided we wanted to move and picked Wilmington, NC as our destination because it was in-state, at the beach, and we had been there previously and loved it. What a perfect idea? We decided to plan our move much in advance so the 200-mile move would be simpler. Our current lease was set to expire on 11/30/2022, so we began searching for a place to call home in September. We had five or six apartments selected to tour on September 30th. Our first incidence of bad luck was that this weekend was also the landfall of Hurricane Ian hitting the Carolina coast, but we still decided to visit.

Our last apartment tour of the day was at Forest Hills Apartments (505 Alpine Dr, Wilmington, NC 28403). When we arrived at Forest Hills, we were greeted by a friendly property manager. At first, it was refreshing to meet a property manager within striking distance of my own age. I would assume this particular property manager is only 5-6 years older than me. We hit it off pretty well. The property manager took us to the demo apartment where we fell in love with the place. However, the property manager said we would find a couple "water bugs" every now and then. My wife and I are very clean people. We have to be, we have cats and I have allergies. We vacuum every day and keep our homes clean. Nevertheless, we think whatever a "water bug" is it would not be a problem for us especially because we could elect to be a part of weekly pest control visits.

Frantically killing roaches coming out of the inside of our refrigerator

The Scam Begins

The property manager tells me I should apply for this apartment because they tend to go pretty quick. Well, sadly, when I attempted the application was incompletable. It would seem to me there is something broken on the apartment's end, as I completed as much as I could, and since this was a Friday evening Forest Hills Apartments had already closed for the weekend. I decide I have to wait until Monday morning to finish my application. At this point, though, I was mostly assured I would be fine since I got so far into the application.

Classic bait and switch

Come Monday morning I call the leasing office and no one picks up. I call a couple more times and finally get a hold of someone. I am told the apartment I halfway applied for (because the application froze) was now taken and unavailable. Well, my wife and I are very distraught because we toured five other apartments that previous Friday and did not like any of them, and Wilmington was 200 miles away from our current home so another 400-mile round trip to find another home sounded agonizing. The property manager comes to the rescue. He calls me to tell me they suddenly have another apartment home that opened up and I could apply for it. This is when the alarms should have been sounding in my head, but I still trusted him. I was going to apply for an apartment I hadn't seen before, which is a colossal mistake I will never make again. I just trusted the guy so much due to our initial meeting and his down to Earth attitude. This apartment is even the same design as the one I had attempted to apply for. He's such a charismatic guy (which makes him even better at lying) that he convinced me easily to immediately apply for this new apartment that opened up. I apply for it and get accepted on October 7th, then pay all the fees and deposits. It would seem all is well. 

This is great. Our biggest issue is resolved. We will have a home to move to once our lease expires at our current home with a huge window to move in. This was going to be our most planned move yet. We had several weeks to move our belongings to our new home. We are excited, but unknowingly have just paid hundreds of dollars and committed to moving into a slum house. Another reason we were relieved is that we had already agreed to move out of our current apartment, so it was nice to know we wouldn't be left without a place to live.

The First Visit

When we arrive, the property manager decides to walk us into our new home. When we return and unlock the door and we're greeted by a smell I have never smelled before. It was a unique smell, that I would come to understand is the stench that cockroaches produce. Already, we are noticing the apartment was not like the one we had seen in our demo. This one was filthy, smelly, and 50 feet from the only trash compactor serving this entire community. He is sure to bring a paper towel. I'm not sure why at the time. When we unlock the door and walk in we immediately see dead roaches on the ground. He assures us this is because the pest control sprayed and the roaches left their hiding spots to crawl out into the entryway to die. I guess he thought they were trying to use the door to escape the poison. Anyway, we begin a tour of the apartment with the property manager. At one point we see another living roach. The property manager then says how he's glad he brought a paper towel and begins to use it to either pick up or kill the roach. Ah, now it makes sense. He knew there would be an issue and pulled out his trusty back-pocket paper towel that was predetermined to be required just in case we bumped into any living roaches. I noticed him attempting to walk into the rooms before us. In retrospect, this was probably a last-ditch effort to clear out any roaches before we were alone. Eventually, we get the place to ourselves and go out to get some basic living supplies.

Upon entering the apartment later this evening we begin to clean the place up because it was not cleaned at all. Some of the more disgusting pieces to note are:

• I can only presume what was pubic and beard hair around the sink and toilet along with a horrid stench of urine.

Random DNA left from the previous disgusting tenants

• Stains on all the walls and kitchen cabinets
• The floor was turned to a brown shade due to the layer of filth

A cleaned floor vs an uncleaned portion

• Roaches behind all the appliances, inside the refrigerator, and inside the internals of the refrigerator. 

Roach living in the fridge internal components

• Roaches crawling underneath the carpet at the seams

Roach entrance into the carpet

• Holes in the walls leading into the internals of the structure

A random hole leading into Hell

• Cracked ceiling and peeling paint (we were also given a paper noting the lead-based nature of the apartment...)

Chipped paint that was never fixed. Also a housing violation.

• None of the doors were sealed to the outside allowing even more roaches to crawl in. We saw them outside the door inches away on the dirt. 

No outside door seal

• Rips in most of the window screens
• Dead bugs in all the light fixtures.

Dead bugs in the kitchen light

• Cracks in all the lightswitch fixtures

Cracks because dumb-dumbs working in maintenance screw them in too tightly

• Kitchen sink leak
• Another fun note is they layer the new vinyl on old vinyl, much like sedimentary rock layers. We could potentially dig through the vinyl to find the original 1960s flooring because I'm sure they just cover up the filth (we call this the Landlord Special)
• Moldy bathtub with much of the base pealed away.

Inside the bathtub

The bathtub base

Rusty vent in the bathroom

• Ah, don't forget the lovely next-door neighbor. Due to the pitiful division that is the shared wall, her marijuana smoke and shouts at her daughter spilled into our apartment freely. 
• The only part that was cleaned or replaced before we arrived was the oven drip pans.

Layers of filth and dead bugs behind the oven

Two cockroach egg sacks under the oven. Notice the vinyl curvature meaning more vinyl beneath has just been covered up

Roach feces on the back of the fridge

Roach crawling out of the back of the fridge

Baby roach crawling from the vinyl into the carpet

Filth where the oven used to be

More filth on the side of where the oven used to be

Filth left under the oven. Notice the random pill left from the last residents.

More filth under the oven, notice the peeling vinyl allowing roaches to go beneath

The Roach buffet left behind by the previous tenants

I would assume another roach hole in the wall

Roach feces on the outlet

Roach chilling on the bathroom sink drain

Would you want your water pouring through this black gunk?

Uncleaned windows

If you'd like to view these disgusting images in video form, you are in luck.

This was the condition our apartment was left for us on move-in day. It was a complete mess. I really don't know if they thought we would be content with it in this state. I was told they did a walkthrough to confirm it was ready, but who really knows if that happened. All I can say is please learn from our mistakes. Never trust anyone who works for a rental management company. Always tour your exact home before accepting. If they don't let you, find somewhere else to live, even if they have easy-to-believe reasons like it's not ready. If the apartments are "flying off the shelves" it's probably an attempt to trick you to hurry your application. I will likely follow up this blog post with one detailing the second half of our story how the company followed up on our initial complaints and how we were able to escape.