What It's Like to Live at Weston Medical Center Apartments in Houston, TX

I lived in Weston Medical Center Apartments (formerly known as Brompton Court) for nearly six years. When I first moved in, this place seemed to be a decent mid-tier complex, with a good price and location – and no breed restrictions for pets. It came recommended by a few friends who lived here years ago, and for the first year or so, I truly enjoyed my stay. It was quiet, and my apartment was comfortable. That started to change after Hurricane Harvey hit in late August 2017, and then rapidly degenerated in 2020 during the pandemic.

During Hurricane Harvey, Weston Medical Center Apartments flooded heavily, with chest-deep water. Every first-floor unit was completely destroyed, along with every car parked on the ground floor, due to the bayou tributary that runs behind the complex as well as the bayou itself. All first-floor units were then gutted, and left as skeletons for a long stretch of time, while the property was purchased by S2 Capital, a firm based out of Dallas that buys up B and C-class apartments and tries to breathe new life into them – or at least, that’s their stated aim. S2 Capital’s first order of business was renaming the property “Weston Medical Center Apartments” and painting over the bricks in a horrible navy-and-dead-body-blue color scheme.

At the time of writing this review, S2 Capital has 53 complaints against them filed with the Better Business Bureau since opening their BBB file in 2017. They have been repeatedly accused of neglecting their properties and having their employees write fake positive reviews to balance out the overwhelmingly negative reviews they face on Google, to keep the ratings for their apartment complexes visible to the public at four stars – although the allegations have not been proven, to my knowledge. If the allegations are true, S2 Residential would be guilty of violating Google’s terms of service and engaging in a blatantly duplicitous move that takes away the freedom of potential tenants to make an informed decision about where they’re living. Google reviews by current residents of Weston Medical Center Apartments level similar accusations, and those accusations seem to be bolstered by the fact that one-star reviews have so many likes while the short five-star reviews do not.

But, on to the complex itself. The apartments currently called Weston Medical Center Apartments were built in 1972, and were not built at a higher foundational elevation like newer complexes in the same area would be in the future to combat flooding. As a result, the property has flooded multiple times over the years to varying degrees of severity – making it a high-risk property. You can see it for yourself after heavy rain; the pavement on the grounds is uneven, and the outer sidewalks are hideous and jagged, resulting in puddles and sometimes dirty ponds, which brings us to the reason why life at Weston Medical Center Apartments is a health hazard.

Water and filth brings in cockroaches, and Weston Medical Center Apartments is COMPLETELY INFESTED with cockroaches property-wide, as you can see browsing other reviews. “Roaches” is the top item on the “frequently mentioned” portion of Google reviews. When those first-floor units were gutted after Hurricane Harvey, the roaches got up in the framework of the buildings and now live and reproduce heavily within the walls of every building. In my apartment, I lived with them for so long that I became numb to them, which is disturbing to me. We paid a pest control fee every month, as if pest control visits the units monthly (they don’t visit at all unless requested). When I complained to the property, pest control came exactly once and did some half-hearted squirts in my kitchen, which was obviously wholly ineffective. I had to take matters into my own hands, and used professional-level home pest control products to try and keep the cockroaches at bay, with mixed results.

The cockroaches are part of life at Weston Medical Center Apartments, and will be until Weston is condemned by the city. Their feces specks drawers, cabinets, floors, and outlets. They would scamper around my bathroom, my desk where I work, my walls, my carpet, and have ruined wall art. I have found dead ones floating in my dog’s water dish and in the toilet. One morning in December 2021, I counted ten in my shower. They have run across my feet while working at my desk and have materialized on other parts of my body – I have even found them crawling on me when I sleep and been startled awake. They have been in my food and my water, and they’ve actually gotten even worse toward the end because I had a bucket of standing water in my bathroom because my AC unit was leaking furiously.

At the time of writing this review, my AC unit was leaking about 5-8 liters of water nightly, and I had a 15-liter bucket in my bathroom set up to keep my bathroom from flooding. After repeated calls to maintenance, they discovered that my drip pain has eroded in several places – and couldn’t be replaced without replacing the entire AC unit because the unit is so old and degenerate that the replacement drip pan was no longer commercially available. I was told in early November 2021 that the unit would be available in about two weeks, and it had not been installed at the time of my move-out (the end of January 2022). That means I went for more than three months straight with a heavily-leaking AC unit. My apologies to the next tenant who has to deal with a flooded bathroom after moving in – I tried to tell them, and they chose to neglect it. If the Google reviews weren’t peppered with allegedly fake 5-star reviews, Weston’s 2-star rating might have deterred you from moving in.

It’s too bad all that water leaking from a decrepit AC unit can’t be used in the pipes, because the water pressure at Weston is weaker than Steve Rogers before he became Captain America, and fluctuates at random. And really – at least Steve Rogers had strength of character. The weak, pathetic toilet in my former bathroom doesn’t even have THAT. It’s a shameful, haplessly stupid toilet that never got its diploma from Toilet Community College. It barely even flushes, and I regularly had to take extra measures to get waste down the pipes (It’s gross, but it’s reality) and if you don’t manually force the lever back into place, it will run nonstop. Keeping it clean is difficult, you never know what might be in it, and I was legitimately embarrassed to allow any guests to use it. One guest once came out and said “your toilet makes me nervous.” Actual quote.

The water pressure issue doesn’t end with my glue-eating classroom-dunce toilet. There were plenty of instances where I’d be showering, and it would take extra time because the water pressure was a limp little gentle run of water. Sometimes it would trickle away and stop altogether, and I’d be forced to stand there in a defunct shower waiting for it to come back. Water shutoffs have been a constant during my entire time living at Weston, which I have never experienced in any other apartment I’ve lived in. We’ve also had power shutoffs, and I’ve lost plenty of produce and frozen foods. Also of note are the shrieking, ear-splitting fire alarms that seem to go off randomly, especially when there’s not a fire.

The laundry facilities at Weston are a joke that nobody laughs at. The laundry rooms are filthy, more than half of them don’t work properly, and will eat up your money. Residents don’t keep tabs on their clothing, so you’ll likely find clothes sitting in machines for hours at a time. In Fall 2021, one of them was closed due to vandalism – which I find disturbing but not surprising given the crime issue at Weston.

Many residents I have personally spoken to have complained that they “don’t feel safe” at Weston Medical Center Apartments. When I was a resident, we would regularly receive emails regarding crime in and around the property. That shouldn’t surprise anyone though, because the front gates at Weston are usually wide open – and when they’re not, you can expect to see a few hovering cars waiting for the gates to open, because if they had any real business being here, they or their host would know how to open the gate with the touch of a button. A friend of mine once lived in Weston, and heard a shootout in the parking lot near her unit – I remember hearing gunshots once, but I assumed they were off someone else (her unit was further out than mine). She ultimately left, fearing her safety. I’ll note that personally, I never felt particularly unsafe there. Neither my car nor my home was broken into (however, my next-door neighbor’s car was broken into, so I’m just lucky). The other residents don’t make me feel unsafe either. I’ve met a few of my neighbors, and they’re wonderful people. I’ve met plenty of other residents and have generally found them to be warm, approachable, good-humored folks that I’m happy to share space with.

But the neighborly good will I feel doesn’t extend to the dog owners at Weston, because there is animal waste all over the grass, and sometimes in the parking lots (and even in the carpeted hallways) because the dog owners who live here can’t be bothered to clean up after their dogs even though waste bags and receptacles are provided all over the property. I would step in it regularly because I suck at navigating the minefield. The “dog park” at Weston is nothing more than a litter box with a couple of benches, and I stopped letting my dog play there eventually (I have photos and video, but they’re too visually offensive to post to a public forum like Google). To any of the dog owners who read this review and do not clean up after their dogs: you are a disgrace to dog owners everywhere. You compound disgrace to an already disgraceful property and a disgrace to your own dignity, granting the generous assumption that you had any to begin with. If you’re expecting the property to clean it up, grow up, pick it up yourself, and stop using your phone to pretend your dog doesn’t poop. Anyone walking through Weston can see massive piles on grass right next to the bag dispensers and waste receptacles, and scattered piles over the rest of the grass like scattered clouds of a Texas summer – if clouds smelled bad, attracted flies, and spread disease.

The pools on the grounds of Weston must spread disease as well, because for the majority of 2021, all pools on the property were shut down by the Houston Health Department with no explanation given by the property. Someone in the office played the COVID card when I asked them directly why the Health Department shut down their pools – but the Camden property next door had all their pools open this summer, clean and beautiful – so I doubt COVID was the reason why Weston’s pools were shut down by the Health Department.

Make no mistake about it, Weston Medical Center Apartments is a degenerate slum of an apartment complex and needs to be shut down, condemned, destroyed and bulldozed Tobacco Road-style. The only way for the site to have any legitimate future is for a new complex to be built on its former site – and I don’t say that lightly. The rapidly-multiplying population of cockroaches are the rightful residents of this complex, and they live here rent-free at the expense of the health of those who pay rent. I would strongly discourage any potential renters scouting Weston Medical Center Apartments from living there, and God have mercy on the property.