A Dallas woman signed an 18-month lease with an apartment complex, only to realize it wasn’t a safe or habitable home.
“This was supposed to be such a beautiful and amazing experience… [I thought] I wasn’t going to have to think about moving anywhere else anytime soon,” said Vick in a TikTok video that has received 41,000 views. But she ended up in an unsafe apartment complex “full of Airbnbs.”
Moving In, Only to Realize the Apartment Was a Nightmare
In the 13 months since Vick and her family moved in, she has had nothing but bad experiences.
“The horror stories that I could tell you… that I’ve experienced with the ownership and the management in the last 12 months [are all] quite literally insane,” she said.
First, she described the management allowing almost every unit in her building to be rented out on Airbnb, something that irked her, considering random strangers moved in on a daily basis.
“Had I known that [they rented to Airbnb] beforehand, I would’ve never leased here because I have children,” she added.
A firearm exchange in an Airbnb property
Vick described a recent situation in which a neighboring Airbnb had a firearm mishap.
“The Airbnb next to me shot a gun in the apartment right next to mine. That bullet was still lodged in the fire extinguisher. If not for the fire extinguisher, I don’t know whose unit it would’ve gone into,” she said. “But, it literally went out of their unit into the fire extinguisher that is in the hallway, and that is what stopped that bullet from entering anywhere else.”
She added that property management did “nothing” about it.
“They refuse to file a police report. They did not evict that unit. In fact, they were in the middle of doing a refinance on this property, so they didn’t want the banks to see that there were any vacant units. They didn’t send out notices to Airbnb about these issues until after the refinance went through,” she claimed.
Issues Keeping the Lights On
Vick also had trouble keeping the power on in her apartment. She discovered the problem after calling her power company, Encore.
“My power keeps getting cut off and every time I call Encore, they’re like, ‘we see that you have power,’” she said. But she could not turn any lights on in her unit. After investigating, she realized her unit was tied to another in the complex. Whenever her power went out, it was because the other unit’s power was turned off.
That also meant she was paying unusually high electricity bills.
“I had to figure that out on my own. I had to be Dora the Explorer. All on my own figure that [expletive] out for Encore and for the owners. Because of that, I had to stay at a hotel and I had to throw away all of my groceries because I was out of power for so long, and I didn’t know when it was coming back,” she said.
Vick submitted reimbursement requests to the apartment owner, but they were ignored.
Continued Arguments With the Apartment Owner
Since then, Vick hasn’t paid her November rent, citing the unpaid electricity reimbursements.
“Today I get a text from the property manager… It says, ‘Hey, you are late on payment. You didn’t submit [the] full November payment. There’s now a late fee being assessed. Please submit payment,’” she said.
Vick replied, “Oh, no babes. I owe you $0. Go ahead and clear that out. Go ahead and clear that ledger because I am owed reimbursement and I talked to the owner so you can go ahead and figure that out with them.”
She has requested to exit her lease, but the apartment’s management has denied her. She is now 14 months into an 18-month lease. The complex has instead offered $200 off rent in exchange for her performing property management duties.
“$200 for all of this. You got me all the way [expletive] up,” she said in her video.
@everydayvickyvick March can’t come soon enough ? #dallasliving #dallasapartments #dallashomes ♬ original sound – V I C K ? FASHION GWORL
Her Apartment Complex—Unknown?
While commenters speculated which complex it was, Vick has not revealed her current apartment, possibly to avoid legal or defamation issues.
Vick has made legal inquiries and threatened to sue if she cannot leave her lease. So far, there has been no resolution. The Mary Sue has reached out to Vick for comment.
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