My boyfriend, my baby girl, and I looked at the Show Apartment for Cary Pines before signing a lease. We were not familiar with the triangle area and needed a place fast. The buildings at Cary Pines looked nice considering our price range, but the Show Apartment is a lie. The office manager told us to remember that it would look a little less lived-in than the one we'd get...not that ours would be crap. I wasn't expecting anything fancy for rent in the 500s, but just after we signed the lease and walked back out of the office, we started to realize what we'd gotten ourselves into. While walking on the sidewalk to our apartment (not the one we were told we'd get originally, but we were totally nice about that, she'd made a simple mistake), we passed a group of young hispanic men working on a ratty old car in the parking lot, playing music. Somehow we'd found the bad area of Cary and signed our money into living there. When we opened the door to our new "home", we were immediately disappointed. Someone had JUST finished "repainting" the apartment that morning, which means they took a sprayer and put a coat of white powder over everything, including door handles, power outlets, and random parts of the insides of cabinets. It was obvious no one had protected the carpet from the paint because it was still wet from having the paint shampooed out. The edges of the carpet were still white. The drawers in the kitchen, which have no tracks underneath, have huge fingerprint smudges from where the dumbasses grabbed them after spraying wet paint on them. No nails or tacks were removed from the walls prior to this powder coat either. And I can't stress this enough: THE POWDER WILL NOT COME OUT OF THE CARPET. I am a clean freak and I vacuumed the carpet before we even brought a piece of furniture in. I continued to vacuum every single day for the first few months in an effort to rid the carpet of the residual white powder, but to no avail. It is ruining my vacuum, and I have to wash all its parts every other time I use it if I want it to have suction. When we showed this to the office manager, she simply smelled it and told us it must not be harmful because it has no odor. She said it couldn't be any kind of paint because paint isn't a powder; paint peels. I believe that the walls are slowly shedding this mess every day, and that's why it gets sucked up every time I try to clean the carpet. I just hope my baby doesn't develop health problems from it being in the air.
We had to list existing problems with the apartment when we moved in, so that we couldn't be held responsible for things when we left. And you can bet I filled it up. #1: Roaches. Once the Cary Pines staff realized their pest control wasn't working, they finally got Terminix. Terminix started coming once a week and the problem only improved slightly. The Terminix man even told me it won't get better unless every single part of the building is treated; and that the hispanic people here didn't keep their apartments clean. First it was full-sized roaches in the kitchen, bedroom, living room, and bathroom. They liked to hang out on the top part of doors and fall on my head when I opened them. It sounds like a nightmare, but it was real. Then came the babies. At first they were so small when they showed up on the counters that I thought they must've been some new kind of bug...but they started to grow up and follow the big ones around. My daughter would see dead or living roaches on the carpet and try to pick them up, not knowing what they were. This prompted yet another irritated call to the office. The office manager would always handle our complaints with her calm Cary Pines Barbie attitude, but all reparations were done much later, or she'd simply say they were doing all they could.
I can smell mold in the bathroom, under the sink. We have a little cabinet where we have to store all of our bathroom supplies and it has a distinct smell to it. The closet with the hot water heater smells the same way. When we called the office and told her we were worried about the baby being around it, she said it was "THE FIRST" SHE'D HEARD OF IT. She was the one who'd made us sign something that said the buildings were old, and used to HAVE mold, but that it was taken care of. It was always "the first" she'd "heard of it". Just another health risk to my family. Not important, I guess.
The hot water heater closet has seen its share of problems. Aside from just being a gross space, which is excusable for a utility closet, it didn't even provide us A/C our first night. We had to lay out on the bed by the window in our underwear. The A/C and heat have continued to give us problems since. Usually it takes a few days to get it repaired. Just yesterday, I noticed a gas smell while I was home with my daughter. I had the A/C on, hoping the air would turn cold and that it wasn't actually broken again. We reported it, and somehow it was important enough to get someone over here from the gas company. He found a gas leak in a pipe in the closet, which was causing our A/C to pump the gas through our vents. What the hell' My boyfriend walked the man to the office when he told the office manager, to make sure she couldn't say she didn't know about it.
Speaking of vents, there is one that has a broken adjustment piece, so it's forever closed. Another actually fell from the ceiling while my little girl stood just a few feet away from it. You can imagine how this made me feel. As for the rest of the construction, the woodwork on our porch and steps has three times as many nails in it as it needs to, like someone didn't know what they were doing when they built it. The windows have little locks on them that don't actually keep them from opening.
The people that live in this neighborhood are unbelievable. I'd say it's 70% hispanic, 25% black, and 5% white. On New Year's, the local Mexican men shot off buck shots that left specks on my boyfriend's windshield. I had to call the police. There have also been at least 2 other instances of gunshots within the neighborhood since then. Some of the little wannabe gangsters have their buyers drive through the parking lot in order to give them their bags of whatever in plain daylight, only to be doing nothing suspicious when the police come rolling by. One gave my boyfriend a bag of coke and told him to try it. And he knows we have a kid and are clean. All I can do is stare down all of the people out here and let them know I'm watching what they're doing, and that they don't scare us. Some of them have been arrested, including one who yelled at me when we had the baby outside one afternoon, but they'll all be back when they make bail. These people help to give their entire race a bad name. They are the stereotypical --------, drinking beers, and playing mariachi music, driving around the parking lot. Or they are the black kids, walking circles around the apartments, yelling into their phones, pants sagging. I don't want my girl to grow up here. I am in no way a racist, but the majority of the tenants here have proven to be unfriendly, loud, low-class, and generally just have no good sense. Some wear gang colors just to piss other people off. We told the manager about seeing gang members selling drugs in the neighborhood, and she just told us it was a citywide problem. We've told them we're out of here when our lease runs out (you have to tell them this or else the lease continues past what you've already agreed to).
The grounds aren't so bad. There is little grass, and there are cigarette butts all over the ground. There's usually some broken glass in the parking lot or stray mail on the ground by the mailboxes. I've found a few empty drug baggies behind the apartments. The tenants just don't care about the place. I'm not afraid to say...DO NOT LIVE IN CARY PINES IF YOU ARE WHITE, HAVE CHILDREN, OR HAVE ANY RESPECT FOR YOURSELF. It's just not worth the frustration.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 07/15/2008
Like attracts like sweetheart, and you apparently were attracted to a community as low class and as rundown as you and your busted mentality. I am a black woman who just visited cary pines today to look for a vacant apartment and could see from the interaction between the rude leasing agent and an angry resident who was saying much of what you're saying about the community that this was no place for me because I have STANDARDS--not because of the distant white blood that runs through my veins. I don't think you'll be happy with a community until you find a place within which you can be insulated in like ignorance. Warmest regards, T.J, MPA
From: disgruntled6098	Date: 07/24/2008
I am the least ignorant person I know, Miss Thang. That's "busted". For some reason, a word from my post was edited, but I have respect for those who have respect for themselves and others. I lived in Cary Pines because I had only a few hours in Wake County to look for an apartment in my price range, so you can hold off on the judgment. Not having the time to scour the entire Raleigh area for an apartment under $700 does not make me rundown. You obviously need something affordable as well if you were looking into Cary Pines. I only posted to keep other families from making the same mistake we did. And I'm a grown woman--I don't need the "sweetheart" attitude. You should be offended by and angry with the type of young black people in neighborhoods like this who make all the other black people look low-class, not with me. Please don't use this helpful web site to communicate any more of your negativity or sarcasm.
From: Anonymous	Date: 06/03/2009
Disgruntled, you are the one that is low class. You're going to judge an entire race of people based on criminal activity you saw at an apartment complex. Thank god you're not my neighbor!

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