Broadway Fortune Apartments

I lived in Broadway Fortune Apartments for 2 years and had an absolutely wonderful experience. When I first moved in, it was under the management of a different Metropolitan Management employee who was subpar to say the least but he was quickly replaced by Chelsea, who is a fantastic manager and made up for all of his shortcomings. She was quick to start making improvements to the building, like fixing up the storage area in the basement for tenant use, and cleaning up the building in general. She also attached a motion sensor light on the outside to help reduce the number of squatters, which along with the street noise is unavoidable in the First Hill area and simply a price you pay for the location (five min walk to work!) The apartments are a great size and come with an enormous closet that I already miss dearly. The kitchens and bathrooms have that old building charm, which is not a euphemism for shitty, they’re just not state of the art. Rent did increase slightly in my time there but nothing outrageous and was indicative of the rent increases across the entire city.

The rents are going up here on an outrageous rate. For the cost of the apartment it is not worth it. The kitchen is outdated and nearly unusable. The worst problem here is the noise. Garbage/​recycling pickup is daily and is right outside the units. The trucks smash the dumpsters at 6am daily and wake anyone on the west side of the building up. On the East side of the building there is a ton of street construction being done at all hours of the night for the new train route, including weekends. In the winter, the uncut trees and shrubs shelter the homeless for a makeshift homeless camp outside some bedroom windows, and employees from the Minor and James medical building stand underneath the windows to smoke, so if you leave your windows open all day, your apartment will smell like cigarette smoke when you get home.
This apartment building is in between 3 major hospitals and near some methadone clinics on First Hill, so there is a constant noise of ambulances, and tweakers fighting in the street.
Monthly the laundry facilities in the basement have a broken washer or dryer, and sometimes the dryer trips the safety switch in the middle of your cycle, costing more money to restart and leaving your clothes wet/​damp.
Two of the neighbors recently told me that they were infested with bed bugs. Looks like it is time to move before they infest the walls and move into other units!
Pros — Location, size of 1 bedroom unit, ease of public transportation.
Cons — Noise, cost, condition of building, safety, responsiveness of manager, loud neighbors on all sides (a lot of college students and very young adults in the building), unreliable amenities, lack of parking, etc.