No. Just...no.
From:
-Anonymous-
Date posted:
3/13/2006
Years at this apartment:
2005
-
2005
Let's start with the positive. The units are very spacious for the price, and appear nice on first glance. Being close to Broadway at least means that the building is convenient to stores, two supermarkets, bus routes, and Seattle Central Community College. The decor in the common areas is almost nice, if a bit chintzy.
Being so close to Broadway, Denny, Olive, and ----'s Drive In also means that street noise is a problem, from sirens to transient bums shouting at each other to loud drunks on the weekends to screeching tires and vehicles with huge subwoofers (which rattle the entire apartment when stopped at the stop light outside.) While some street noise is of course expected in the middle of Capitol Hill (I now live on First Hill and more sirens don't bother me if it means fewer drunken idiots screaming outside of my window at 4 AM), this place is really a lot worse than many I've seen since then, even by the standards of places close to Broadway.
Many of the other tenants are also noisy and obnoxious. The people directly below us had a subwoofer which they insisted on playing at all hours, including the middle of the night on Sundays - even after we complained. The people above us had two screaming children. The floors are extremely thin and a little bit of noise reverberates through the entire apartment. Once, a large group of tenants gathered on the front steps and threw an extremely loud beer party while we were trying to sleep, and there was nothing we could do to stop them - they totally blew us off, as did the manager, as did the police. The common area and the front steps are often dirty and covered in trash. The shrubbery outside the front is neglected and the pots serve as cigarette receptacles more than anything else.
Safety is a going concern. One of the Broadway bums built a fire directly underneath my window one night, then wandered off and let it spread to the surrounding underbrush. Thankfully, the fire department was called before it got too big. The building itself is also marginally secure at best - people have left the back door propped open on more than one occasion, even after manager and tenants alike put up signs with huge black letters telling them not to. Don't live in this building with your doors unlocked for too long, especially if you don't have renters' insurance.
Parking is nonexistent. If you're lucky, you can get a space somewhere on Harvard within a couple of blocks, or on 10th near the park. Otherwise, you're up the river. Don't live here if you want to keep a car.
The postal service in this area is also next to useless. Even though the building is right next to a post office, the zip codes are drawn in such a way that the building gets its mail from the post office all the way over on 23rd, making collection of packages extremely inconvenient, especially for someone without a car. The mail carrier when I was there was also totally useless and failed to follow clear written instructions on multiple occasions, as well as frequently and randomly failing to deliver mail with the proper address on it. (This is, of course, not the fault of the management, but it's still a part of the wonderful experience of living here.)
As mentioned in the previous review, the building's management alternates between being merely useless and totally in violation of the law. The manager was impossible to get ahold of and really didn't care about anything or anyone except for himself (even before his tenants found out he was a convicted felon). Even after he "resigned", the landlords continued to illegally fail to notify tenants of maintainence. The coin-op washers and dryers in the basement were removed without prior warning, and not replaced for weeks.
I would not recommend this property, or any other property run by Northwest Apartments, which misleadingly bills their website as a "resource to help prospective tenants find apartments in Seattle and its surrounding areas quickly and easily", even though they are a for-profit corporation which runs all of the properties advertised and is only interested in sucking unwitting tenants into a long lease so they can take their money. I know other people who have had similar issues in other buildings owned by them.
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