Paso Robles tenant asked management to fix a roach infestation. She got evicted
A Paso Robles resident is alleging that her 2-year-old apartment was infested with cockroaches — and now, she says she’s facing an eviction over the vermin problem.
Diana Suhovich, a resident of the Arrive apartment complex in Paso Robles, said she first spotted a roach in her then-brand-new apartment just four days after moving into the unit in April 2024.
At one point, the infestation was bad enough that walking through some parts of the apartment would produce a grisly crunching noise as roaches under the carpeting were crushed underfoot, Suhovich said.
Suhovich’s said her ex-fiance “would stand at the edge of my carpet, meeting up with the hardwood floor, and just step across, and you could hear popping and crunching.”
What followed was nearly two years of back-and-forth with Arrive management as Suhovich attempted to get the roach problem taken care of for good — and hers is not the only story to follow that pattern at the complex.
The Tribune tried repeatedly to reach Arrive management over the last two weeks but did not receive a response.
Roaches cause health issues
Suhovich and her family were among the first to move into her building in the Arrive apartment complex that April.
The family came to Arrive after a period of homelessness that included living at a La Quinta Inn for an extended period of time, she said.
While homes with children will naturally require more upkeep, Suhovich said she did her best to keep the apartment clean and free of food lying out in the open.
She said seeing the roaches within her first week at Arrive convinced her that they were there from the start, and therefore not caused by her family’s arrival. From there, the issue worsened with time, with more roaches spotted seemingly by the month.
But it was over the past six to nine months that things “really took a turn for the worst,” Suhovich said, as the infestation grew out of control.
“Obviously, they come out in the dark,” Suhovich said. “I would come out to the kitchen and turn the light on, and they would always be coming out from the counter and the refrigerator.”
As the infestation escalated, Suhovich and her children started experiencing breathing issues — a common respiratory reaction to the proteins present in the insects’ bodies, saliva and fecal matter, according to the American Lung Association — to the point that her daughter needed to get an inhaler, she said.
Suhovich contacted Arrive’s management early on in her time at Arrive, notifying the on-site manager shortly after she saw the first roach. While management was responsive to her requests, she had difficulty connecting with the complex’s contracted pest control company, she said.
One time, Suhovich’s family came down with COVID-19 on the day the pest control was scheduled to come.
More recently, a failure by management to provide at least 24 hours’ advance notice for a planned extermination scuttled the work — a persistent pattern in Arrive management’s response to the issue, Suhovich shared in an email.
When pest control did enter the apartment in 2025, they placed traps but didn’t appear to spray any insecticide, Suhovich said, which would prove ineffective in ending the infestation for good.
“Your team has attempted remediation on multiple occasions, including two separate cleanings that required rework due to incomplete or inadequate performance,” Suhovich said in an email to management that she shared with The Tribune. “While there has been a reduction in visible activity, the infestation persists throughout the unit.”
Meanwhile, Suhovich attempted to fight the bugs herself, with limited success.
“I always made sure to keep in contact with (management),” Suhovich told The Tribune. “I did what I could do — I went and spent probably a good $100 to $200 on sprays from Target — non-toxic sprays — just to do something, at least, to try to keep it at bay, because at this point, I knew they were coming out of the walls, and there was nothing more that I could do.”
Are roaches a landlord or tenant responsibility?
According to the California Department of Real Estate, cockroaches that are not caused by the tenant’s occupation of a dwelling can give tenants grounds to withhold rent payments as a remedy to the absence of repairs or pest control.
The precedent was set in Green v. Superior Court of San Francisco, a 1974 case that established the implied warranty of habitability, which requires that landlords maintain rental properties in a habitable condition.
Eventually, pest control was able to kill off most of the infestation in late March, though after dealing with the issue for around two years, Suhovich was already withholding her rent.
When Suhovich again refused to pay rent in March, she was served with an eviction action.
“I had kind of just went in and said, ‘Hey, I don’t find it fair that to pay the rent, because we’ve been dealing with this unsanitary issue for two years,’” Suhovich said.
Roach issue may be widespread
According to Suhovich, the issue with roaches has been reported by at least a handful of other residents, whose concerns also were met with varying levels of urgency from management.
One resident who agreed to speak on the record on the condition of anonymity said she and her boyfriend moved into their apartment around two months ago, while she was around seven months pregnant.
Within an hour of moving her belongings into the unit, she saw her first roach, she said.
“I was 30 weeks pregnant, and they knowingly let me move into an apartment that had roaches in it when I was pregnant,” she said. “That is what I think irked me the most.”
Arrive management responded by putting lines of Borax around her appliances and providing her with over-the-counter remedies, which she said did little to fix the issue.
“I’m sleeping in my house (and) I’m alone, so I wasn’t wearing much, and I wake up to a feeling of something crawling high up on my inner thigh,” she said. “I wake up and I freak out, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God’ — I look under my blankets and sure enough, it’s a f---ing roach.”
While her infestation wasn’t on the same scale as Suhovich, that incident was enough to prompt her to go to management and demand a new unit, citing health concerns under the California Civil Code.
Her new unit has been roach-free so far, but she said she’s heard similar stories from three other current tenants, with the level of infestation varying by case.
At least four Google Reviews on Arrive’s search page listed roaches as one of tenants’ most persistent issues during their time living there.
The Tribune reached out to Arrive management half a dozen times over the course of around two weeks but did not receive a reply to its inquiries.
On-site managers replied, saying they would send The Tribune’s requests up to higher management, but no response came by the time of publication.
For her part, Suhovich and her family are packing up and moving to a new home in Oregon once their time at Arrive is up, she said.
She’s also exploring legal options in attempt to recoup rent for the months when the infestation caused health issues, along with her move out.
