UPDATE: I wanted to add an update to this situation. It is now over a year later and people are still having health problems from this place. I have developed mild asthma because of the lung infection I had last year. I am generally not affected by it, but I cannot run for the train without gasping for breath. Unfortunately, my friend who lived above me fared worse. She had pleurisy from the mold in the walls and had to be hospitalized. While there, they did a CT scan on her and found 5mm nodule cysts in her lungs. The doctor at the hospital said these occur most often from mold infections. She had an expensive and painful treatment to try to get rid of them, but she is still waiting to see the results. We are actually considering a class action law suit against Layton. The rent may be cheap, but your hospital bills won't be.



I actually moved out of Layton Hall in September, but am just now writing my review because of how angry I was. I couldn't think about the place without crying.

SUMMARY:
Roaches, bed bugs, broken air conditioner, use your clothes to clean up maintenance messes, ruin your furniture, crappy laundry, unsafe area, shared (and ridiculously expensive) utilities, noisy, toxic mold in the walls. That's for anyone that doesn't want to read through the saga of hell I experienced at Layton.

THE GOOD:
-This place is relatively cheap compared to the rest of the area. We paid 1200 a month for a 50-year-old, poorly maintained two-bedroom that frequently had no working amenities, but plenty of bugs. Also, it cost us about 1600 in damages so... we saved absolutely no money whatsoever. There is nothing good about this place.


THE BAD:
-Roaches and were everywhere. The small Asian variety (actual species, apparently not supposed to be found in this country) weren't too bad, although you found them everywhere. The American version, however was the size of my thumb, fast as hell, and impervious to the pesticides that had to be sprayed every other week to keep them at bay (It should be mentioned that frequent pesticide use is shown to lead to COPD, a very dangerous breathing issue that is the 4th highest cause of death in this country.).

-The bed bugs showed up about a month after we moved in. They infested our mattress and bit us all over at night. I couldn't concentrate in class because I was constantly scratching the bleeding welts. It was terrible. We ended up having to throw away much of our furniture, including our brand-new mattress, because of this issue. Add a 1000 bucks to the running total, if you wish (Another neighbor also got rid of her bed-bug infested items, but this makes no difference. Why' Because within an hour of throwing our furniture away, other tenants came and took it for their own apartments. Yes, even our used mattress. So the cycle continues, as it just spreads the bugs to other buildings.).

-The air conditioning crapped out after just a couple of weeks there. It took them three weeks to fix it because ----- the manager didn't want to spend the money to replace the obsolete system. It was currently 100 degrees outside, and the temperature inside the apartment was well over 80 (this is ILLEGAL in the state of Virginia). My fiance and I couldn't sleep, but if we opened the windows, the people yelling and making noise until well after 1am kept us awake. He was frequently cranky because of the lack of sleep.

-When the HVAC people came to "fix" the air conditioner, they sprung a leak. Instead of using towels or something of their own to mop up the water, they used OUR CLOTHES. They took them out of a box we had not unpacked (this included my BRA AND PANTIES) and used them to sop up the mess. Then they left the clothes in a pile and said nothing to us, not even leaving a note. They also used up all of our toilet paper, although that seemed to be an unrelated incident. These clothes were ruined because some tar-like substance from the AC coated them. Add these clothes to the running total.

-When they removed the AC, they put it on top of a dresser, scratching up the top of it and leaving tar gunk on it too. It would have cost 500 dollars to fix this dresser, but when I tried to make a settlement with Layton Hall so they would not have to pay so much, they ignored me for a full month and never took care of it.

-When you washed your clothes downstairs, people would take your stuff out and leave it on the floor. Also, much of my stuff is ruined because, somehow, brown paint got into the washer and covered my whites when I washed them. It costs three dollars a load to ruin your clothes at Layton.

-Go to Fairfaxunderground.com and put in the address under Arrest/Ticket Search. You'll get over a page of vehicle violations (no big deal) drug possessions (bigger deal), and violent assault crimes (biggest deal). Because there are no locks on the buildings, just on the apartments themselves, you frequently get solicitors and worse. Several times mafia-looking people came to our door looking for a "Mr. Martinez" and, not believing me, once tried to come into the apartment. I stopped opening the door when my fiance wasn't home after that. Also, I never felt safe walking around. I would get catcalls and dirty remarks yelled at me by other tenants when walking from my car to the door. Once, when walking in from my car, a person hid behind another vehicle and watched me walk away, then followed me, crouching behind the cars. Scary.

-Frequently you have no hot water and sometimes no water at all. Also, and they WILL NOT TELL YOU THIS UNTIL YOU SIGN THE LEASE, the utility bills are totaled between all of the apartments, then split evenly between them. That means that, no matter what my fiance and I did to save money: turn off lights, use windows instead of AC, we still had to pay the same amount as the 8 people living in the three-bedroom apartment below us. Our bills came sporadically and were difficult to determine how much they were, but we did some math and came up to 240 bucks a month on gas and electric for two people. We didn't even have to pay water. In comparison, we now pay appr. 120 for both in our much larger condo.

-Walls are made of roach-infested, mold-ridden paper. You can not only hear EVERYTHING going on in other apartments, you can SMELL everything going on in other apartments. The rotten food smells from downstairs literally made me ill and the many children living below us were constantly running up and down the stairwells (if they got sick of making noise in the actual apartment, that is).

THE UGLY:
-There is mold in the walls. Everywhere. It's the toxic black mold called Strachybotrys atra (my fiance is a health specialist and tested it). The management knows about it, but lies to you and tells you it isn't there. They even sign a paper saying it's not there, but they have seen it and know its true (A neighbor pointed the mold out to the manager and the manager basically told her she was imagining it. When she finally got someone to fix it, none of the safety precautions needed were taken, like plastic sheeting and bleaching the areas affected, which spread the mold through the entire building and made everyone, not just that tenant, sick.). My neighbor came down with a near-fatal lung disease and had to move away for health reasons. The building I was in pretty much cleared out while I was there because the health problems were so bad. I feel for the people that moved in after us.
I was attending graduate school when I developed a cough. I went to the doctor several times and had to endure rigorous tests. I missed three weeks of school because when I got up out of bed, I would cough until I was sick and vomited blood. I finally bit the bullet and paid for the final month of our lease while also paying for (and living in) a new condo because I had pneumonia and almost was hospitalized. While moving out has helped greatly, I still have not completely kicked the fungal lung infection that caused the pneumonia. I incurred over 500 dollars of medical bills, even with insurance.

IN CONCLUSION:
This place is terrible. I promise you, they have low rates, but the money is not worth the risk to your property and to your health. You'll probably make up the low cost in damages anyways. The management is awful and you'll be lucky to get an apology out of them (I certainly never did). We ended up having to hire a lawyer to draft a letter to get out of there. We found they were violating several health and building codes. Apparently the city has been trying to tear them down for a couple of years now, but Gates, Hudson, and Associates refuses to sell to them. To be honest, they could probably just be condemned and the city wouldn't have to pay a dime. I don't know what I can do to stress to you that you should never, ever move here.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 01/18/2008
Great write up! I hope people take this to heart. I'm in a completly different building and have all the same issue with mine. Not a good place to live.
From: lilpinklamb	Date: 01/18/2008
agreed! very good write up. pretty much spot on! I guess I was lucky or ignorant about the mold in the walls. I never saw any but I certainly wouldnt be surprised. Also I got out after about 3 months. All I did was put an ad on craigslist and within minutes people were banging the door down to get in this place. i was going to disclose all this and hope someone would ummm not mind as much as say, ME but half the people who ended up replying to my CL ad, went AROUND me, straight to ----- and the leasing office, hearing someone wanted to break lease early, and signed right up. so i dont even feel bad about that. HA! and they ended up paying the fees, so thats what they get for trying to go around me getting out of my own apartment. i ended up not being able to move out slowly, sorting what is roach infested or not. had to stuff everythign in boxes and rent a storage unit. I was "out" within days of requesting it. although thats neither here nor there.... I didnt realize until i read this post that the utilities were shared. i was told the opposite actually. it all makes sense now though. since i only actually STAYED tere about one night a week, since it pretty much grossed me out thinking about sleeping in roaches etc. or knowing i will be kept up well past midnight with loud noises and yelling. and the smell was pretty sickening. the hallways, as soon as you walk in. smells like fried poop. so, HOW could my power bills be so MUCH if im never there? hmmm no wonder.... Still PO'ed about the $150 ferret cage i bought that was delivered to my door and someone stole before i could get home the next day. real classy....
From: Anonymous	Date: 01/18/2008
It seems everyone blames the staff, but who would want that job really? I blame the management company and the owners. They are the ones with the money, power and control. I tried the fairfax underground thing, but only found 5 things dating back to 2005 or earlier. What did you enter to get more information?
From: FairfaxFemme	Date: 01/22/2008
To the "anonymous" talking about the management company: I completely agree. Gates, Hudson, and Associates were just as terrible to work with as the actual staff. My problem with the staff was that they wouldn't forward my complaints to the proper authorities (also a problem with the management hiring crap workers). That whole place is a mess. As for the fairfaxunderground.com, I went to Ticket/Arrest Search and put "Layton Hall" as the street and Fairfax VA 22030 in the appropriate fields. Many of the incidents are traffic violations, but most of the worst incidents, felonies as opposed to misdemeanors, occurred within the last 2-3 years. I didn't count them all, but I would say 75% were recent. Hope that helps! To lilpinklamb, I am sorry about your cage being stolen! I understand the feeling; our newspaper was frequently taken before we got a chance to grab it and a care package my mother sent me (since I was sick for SO long) was stolen as well. It wasn't anything of value- just soup and some of my favorite foods, books, magazines, etc., but it was upsetting that it occurred. I wish I could say with certainty that it was a neighbor, but since there are no locks on the buildings, it could have been anyone. This is just a closing thought: my fiance and I are now renting through a private owner. It's a condo and, while we still have the same rights and privileges of a renter, the place is much better maintained and actually cheaper than an apartment of the same quality. I just don't think it's possible to get the same care from a group managing hundreds, maybe even thousands of apartments. Craigslist.org is a great place to look. Good luck to all you apartment hunters!
From: Anonymous	Date: 04/02/2008
Thanks for this post. I will definitely stay away from this apartment complex.

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