I lived in the 201 I Street building for 6 months. This apartment was my second after living at Shirlington House in Arlington, VA for 3 years. I also wrote a review for them. I moved here because I wanted to live in the city in a walkable community with more conveniences like the metro and the grocery store within walking distance.

The location is great. It was an okay apartment for the money. Nice hardwood floors and adequate 1 bedroom space for one or two people. When I first moved in, they usually did maintenance requests within a day or so. They were starting some remodeling work, but that is understandable for a building that old. Things were satisfactory for the first few months and I thought I might stay there for a while. However, when we got around to lease renewal time which came in only 6 months, things turned sour.

First, they said they were raising rent 12% for anyone who's income was not low enough with promises to raise 12% yearly thereafter. On a side note, this review may be moot for most people since now they are only accepting people who qualify for Section 8. Also, at the time I was in the building, management was in another apartment building in the neighborhood, and they looked over three buildings. Now there appears to be separate management for this building. Besides that, in addition to a new lease, they wanted me to sign a document that said I had received papers showing the results of the lead analysis for this building. I had never seen these papers. I had signed this paper at the beginning of my lease, but was not paying attention in the flurry of move-in day paper signing. I went to the office to ask to at least see these papers. They refused to show them to me unless I came within a small window of time in the middle of the day. And besides that, the manager was rude about it and yelled at me that they had no lead. Needless to say, that was a turning point and I decided not to sign the lease. Also in the last month, they would not respond to any maintenance requests. I left messages on the office phone that were not returned for the last 45 days I was there. There is no way to know whether this was backlash for my calling them on their attempt to railroad a fraudulent document. Other staff were not quite as rude as the manager, however, some showed a lack of intelligence. One maintenance guy did seem to be on top of things whenever he responded to requests.

Other stuff: The security gate was regularly stuck open. I never noticed any of the roach problems others had. Sometimes that depends on the cleanliness of yourself or your neighbors. Also they took longer than the legally allowable time to return my deposit. I had to call them.

Overall, I think that the service was not at a satisfactory level although the building was ok. Even with the 12% increase, the rent would have still been one of the lowest for the area at least for the first year. I have my suspicions that they were trying to scare all of the none section 8 tenants out. I have no problem living with section 8 tenants (there's good and bad section 8 tenants and good and bad none-section 8 tenants), but management at the time seemed to have a problem with providing a minimal level of service. If they wanted to move all of the none section 8 tenants out, I think it would have been better if they had just been upfront about that.

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