Evergreen Park Apartments, Vancouver, WA - charged repair fees when moved out - poor living experience

# 12 for October 9, 2003

Complaints.com received the following on October 8, 2003:

From:

RE: Evergreen Park Apartments, Vancouver, WA - charged repair fees when moved out - poor living experience

We were told that we were moving into a nice "new" apartment - new carpeting, paint, etc., and found that when we had signed the lease, and were shown OUR apartment, it was entirely different than the apartment we were originally shown. Ultimately, we were charged $465.00 deposit, on top of the 1st and last month's rent. We lived there for 7 months, waiting to buy a house, and when we moved out, we were hit with this: Charged for "light cleaning - $200.00, when we completely cleaned both the carpet and repainted the wall areas; Repainting fee - when we moved in, we were told that they would probably repaint and replace the carpeting again for the new tenants, and we shouldn't be charged ANYTHING (yeah, right!); We had to pay a $75.00 deposit for putting a satellite dish up on a 4x4x8 wood post which was part of the structure - we were not only NOT paid back the deposit, but were charged an additional $25.00 for "damages" (2 screw holes that were patched, puttied and painted when we left!) We paid $25.00 for a pass to the fitness/equipment room - and were told that we could return the pass anytime, but that we had to wait until we left to recover the deposit, which we were charged for anyway. Because we had "damaged" the apartment with nail holes (to hold up some pictures on 3 of the 8 walls), we had to completely forfeit the whole deposit, as well as the fitness;equipment room deposit, and the satellite dish deposit, for a total of $635.35! We were further lied to directly, by omission and through obfuscation:

1) We asked if there was security at the complex. We were told that there was NO NEED for security-there were NEVER any problems! Later we found that when the cops DID come in, they had to come in pairs.

2) We asked about whether or not there were problems with non-functional cars littering the area-we were told that a towing company toured the complex every night, and towed away AUTOMATICALLY every vehicle that didn't belong there, or which may have been non-operational-except that in the 7 months that we lived there, there was ONE vehicle that was towed away, and that was a vehicle that the cops chased into the complex and the driver arrested!

3) We asked about problems with any neighbors-we were told that the neighbors were the best in the world...that there were NEVER any problems, etc. In fact, our upstairs neighbors had 3 kids and were stomping on the floors overhead at all hours of the night, had pets that were not authorized and one of their children would vacuum the floors at all hours of the night and day.

Jim Guthrie - La Center, WA