Fiesta Park Apartments

We moved out on May 1^st after putting our notice in (we gave them at least a 45 day notice) after living there just over a year. We initially found the place online and did most of our research online as we were moving from out of state and I remember the neighborhood from years ago not being too bad of an area.
Boy, has all that changed! We noticed within days a major roach problem. It was so bad that we weren’t able to do any cooking at the place or have any appliances, such as a toaster or coffee pot in the apartment because the roaches would infest them. We tried everything! The complex tried fogging a couple times, but that did nothing.
The office will let anyone live there and we couldn’t even walk to our apartment without walking through a haze of marijuana smoke. We complained countless times. We weren’t even away from the smell or the smoke in the apartment as it filtered through and stained the bathroom walls with a sickly yellow. One day around 5PM I was walking to the apartment and harassed by a group of teenagers smoking marijuana. They refused to move to let me up my stairs, blew smoke in my face and threatened to come back for me if I tried calling the police on them and threatened to shoot my boyfriend when he came out to see what was going on.
Maintenance I feel sorry for because I think they have too few maintenance for the amount of problems the place has. Work orders don’t get completed. We called about our upstairs bathroom not having the shower nozzle soon after moving in. It NEVER got replaced. Neither did the bathroom door that was broken when we moved in or the front door that broke soon after we moved in, or the window that got broken out when kids threw oranges at it or countless other issues. The only thing that got fixed was my hot water heater when it started sparking and smoking. Emergency maintenance came and shut it off and told me that the regular maintenance crew would be there in the morning to fix it. They didn’t show up for 2 ½ weeks and that was only because I had to call and tell them that my hot water heater was still broken. Their excuse was that they thought emergency maintenance fixed it.
I learned the hard way that you need to get EVERYTHING in writing at the office. We tried paying our rent online on April 2^nd, but online payments were disabled. Worked all day on April 3^rd and April 4^th was Easter, so when I went in to pay rent on April 5^th, they told me it was late and they were adding late fees to my account. I asked if they would forgive the late fees since they disabled online payments and it wasn’t convenient for me to get in and pay until April 5^th. Manager also gave us a story about how some residents «figured a way around the system to pay rent» even though she wasn’t aware of it and they disabled it so they could give residents codes for paying online instead of figuring a way around the system. Btw, the way «around the system» was to click on the ‘pay your bill’ tab. Anyway, late fees. I asked if they would forgive the late fees since they disabled the online payments and made it really inconvenient. Both the manager and the rental agent said they’d look into it.
When we went into the office a couple weeks later to see what it would cost us if we extended our lease for 10 days until our new place was ready, the rental agent brought up the late fees and I asked her if her and the manager looked into forgiving them. She looked me straight in the eyes and said, I don’t recall this conversation you are speaking of. I tried bringing up parts of it and she just had this glazed look on her face. Incidentally the manager was in her office and just kept screaming out her door at the rental agent we were taking to about what she was doing wrong on rental applications. When they gave us a very inflated price of what it would cost to extend our lease for 10 days, we decided against it since a hotel would be cheaper and we wouldn’t have to deal with the roaches or the office. Also, it took 2 rental agents 25 minutes to come up with the prorated rate for 10 days and they wouldn’t give us anything in writing and that was a big red flag to me after the rental agent conveniently forgot about our conversation about the late fees.
I understand that sometimes because of circumstances you have to take a place where you can, but if you have any other choice, I would stay far away from this place.