Can You Top These NYC Apartment Horror Stories?

NEW YORK CITY — Who doesn't have a story about the neighbors throwing feces out the window, the echoes of a never-ending conga line or 4.5-foot ceilings in windowless boxes?

New Yorkers make big sacrifices to live in this city, and pay enormous rents. Why? Because no one has better starter home horror stories than we do.

No one.

Don't believe us? Check out these best tales of real estate woe collected from Patch Neighbor Posts and on reddit. Can you top these New York City apartment horror stories?

We didn't think so.

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"It Helps With The Itching"

I was penny pinching but needed to move, and a mutual friend had a room opening up in their loft for like $700/800. I only stayed there about 3 nights. The bites were so bad that I had around 50+ after the first 2 nights. The girl who I rented the room from was like, “oh yeah, we just take really hot showers because it helps with the itching”. (m1kasa4ckerman | Reddit)

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Golden Showers

My upstairs neighbors used to pour urine from their window into our backyard because they were too lazy to walk to their bathroom. (denitaelizabeth | Reddit)

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"Start Bailing"

In heavy rain it would flood knee-deep in some areas, and start pouring into my room.
When this happened the only thing to do was to grab the 5 gallon bucket kept on the roof for this purpose, and start bailing. The apartment sucked on many levels, but bailing ice water off the roof at 2 AM wearing nothing but a bathrobe and fireman boots was definitely the most ridiculous shitty apartment situation I've ever personally encountered. (tgjer | Reddit)

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"And Then We Got Bedbugs"

I lived in an apartment above a restaurant in Little Italy. The restaurant was closed for a couple months during the winter and during that time the pipes froze and burst. Sewage (poo) flooded our apartment through the toilet multiple times. And then we got bedbugs. (sheache | Reddit)

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Crawlspace

My friend rented a storage crawlspace as a bedroom for a month or two. It was on the UES and like $700 a month 10 years ago. (EscapeGoat81 | Reddit)

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"Feces (Human I Guess)"

I live on a ground floor apt with a door that opens up to a courtyard space and the number of disgusting items we see in front of our door is astounding. Feces (human I guess), bagged vomit, used condoms, broken beer bottles, etc. (beccamorty | Reddit)

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Time To Move

Roof caving in, no heat, room always cold in there winter, mice, roaches. Other tenants in building not clean, loud kids, building a mess. Glad in moved out of NYC. (Bert Gives | Patch Neighbor)

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Four Years On The Couch

A former co-worker spent four years post-breakup living with her ex-boyfriend because they both refused to give up the cheap, rent-stabilized apartment that they were both on the lease for. She got it in the end when he moved out after four years of sleeping on the couch. (gambalore | Reddit)

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Stacked Shanties

Once while house hunting I came upon a studio flat in Bushwick. The building was obviously a former factory. The ceiling was about 30 feet up and the building stretched about 100 feet back. In the middle of the room were hastily built shacks. Did I mention these were two stories? They stacked two of these shanty rooms on top of each other into a stack. (yardship | Reddit)

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"Repair"

Got a super cheap ground floor apartment. It was above the back entrance to the building, bordered the last hole of a golf course ( lots of drunk, loud golfers) and next to the elevator. The roaches were the size of my palm. The bathroom ceiling would randomly drip/leak yellowish liquid ( still have no idea what it was). If you called the supers, you would run the risk of them stealing from you. They also like to "repair" things by making a hole in the wall. (LunaLady87 | Reddit)

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Inspectors In The Treehouse

For a little while (really a little while, you'll see) my girlfriend lived in an indoor treehouse of a loft room, in the McKibben Lofts. She paid $500 a month for a room that was about 8x10', 5' ceilings, and a plywood floor with holes in it big enough to see into the bedroom of the person below it. It had no door, just an opening with a cloth over it, which you reached by climbing about 10' up a home made ladder made of 2x4s. About a week or two after she moved in she got a call at work from her new roommate that the state housing inspector had come around and that her room was going to be demolished the next day. ( abstract-realism | Reddit)

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Update: An alleged New York City apartment horror story has been removed from this roundup. This reporter apologizes and, for the first time in her life, sincerely regrets having never seen "The Addams Family."