Manchester Arms

Unfortunately I know a bad review isn’t going to stop anyone from renting here because it’s one of the cheapest places in Capital Hill (for a reason), but I feel like people should have fair warning.
1. They may advertise that each space comes with a fridge and stove, but there’s no guarantee of size or condition in the lease and they take advantage of that. For example, the space my friend just rented has a broken down rusty electric stove and a dorm fridge — when asked if maybe the building owner could get a normal fridge in there (because the other units have one and dorm fridges don’t get cold enough to properly store meat), the property manager said he doubted it was possible. When questioned about why a unit would only come with a janky dorm fridge when it’s not reasonable to expect someone to use one of those full time when renting a living space there, he literally said quote «When you’re broke you just have to deal with things sometimes». No, seriously, I’m not making this up.
2. They don’t have any mechanism for giving people receipts when they get checks. This is direct from the property manager, when I asked for a receipt when dropping off almost $ 2000 for rent and deposit. I’m fairly certain this isn’t actually legal, but I haven’t found out for sure yet. I’ll update this review when I do.
3. This place has no concept of customer service — unless you enjoy being asked «yeah, is that it? I’m busy.» when you call to ask a question.
4. The building is run down, the rooms dingy and small, and the wifi network you pay for with your utilities (required, not a choice) is laughable. Oh, and the bathroom that is shared on efficiency floors is a one-​seater, so you’re basically sharing one toilet and tub with 12 other people.
5. I know it’s tough to be a new employee, but we’re now on the third paperwork signing session with the property manager — this time it’s because it wasn’t filled out with the correct amount the first two times, despite me asking more than once if the amount was right because it seemed like something was missing. Oh, and if you’re co-​signing for someone you can expect snide comments about tenants who need co-​signers and paying $ 50 to have them run a full tenant background check instead of filling out co-​signer paperwork that only looks at your income and job; they’ll be calling your old landlords and pulling criminal history. FYI, the background check company itself is confused about why that’s going on (they specifically called me to ask why I was filling out the wrong paperwork for the wrong type of background check).
If you can at all afford to live somewhere else, you should. If not… you have my sympathy.

DO NOT LIVE HERE! I almost don’t know where to begin with how many problems I have had with this place. I had 3 different landlords during my one year lease and none of them were responsive to the issues in the building. My ceiling leaked for days before anyone came in to fix it and then the patch work was never completed! I had issues with rats and mice, my mail and packages were stolen, people were always digging through the dumpsters outside, and the lock on the outside door was constantly being broken so the door was always left open making the building very unsafe. The only way I could ever get the landlord to do anything was to threaten to report the issues to the city. Finally, the worst part is after my lease ended, the landlord charged me half of my deposit for cleaning and maintanence fees that were only issues because of his neglecting to take care of problems when I first reported them. Total bullshit. I am happy to finally be out of the place and you couldn’t pay me enough to go back and live there! I can not stress this enough, DO NOT LIVE HERE!