The Washingtons Apartments

"A homeless man entered my apartment and after talking to management and asking about implementing security or at least surveillance cameras, they said “This is how the property has been designed and nothing is changing”. If you live in this building, you better start barricading your door!"

"I'll start with an overall assessment and then dive into the pros and cons in a little more depth. Bottom line: *this is the worst apartment complex I have stayed in in Boston to date, hands down. It's a great location at a good price, ultimately hamstringed by management and maintenance that are not just ineffectual, but actively detrimental.* Pros: Backs up to the Fells. Right on the Orange line. The location is incredible, and the space you get for the price is impressive, particularly given that location. That alone is worth a couple of stars, and were the cons not so overwhelming, would alone be worth 3 stars out of 5. Cons: As listed in a number of other reviews, getting in touch with management is completely luck-based and nearly impossible. There is a single "on-site" manager, who is only around a few hours a day and rarely reachable by phone. Greystar has implemented an off-shore answering service, so after a few unanswered rings, it redirects to that answering service who then tell you they will have management "give you a call back" - even for emergencies. Having gone through that process a dozen or so times now, the average response time is somewhere north of a week. There have been an occasion or two where I have been contacted back in a couple of days, but by and large the responses come in over a week later. To put a finer point on it, I'll share a couple of illustrative anecdotes that drive home the utter failure of management here: 1) Greystar has a "virtual tour" system. That system allows prospective renters to come check out an apartment without having someone onsite. Last week I came home to someone *entering my apartment* with access having been granted by the virtual appointment service. They were looking for an apartment with an identical number, but at The Washington's building across the street (i.e. right apartment number, wrong building number). They had nonetheless been granted unlocked access to my apartment by means that remain unclear (I contacted management immediately, and have yet to hear back as of my contact last week). 2) Management scheduled preventative maintenance. We were told that this would occur over a one week period from the date of the email. Rather than being given the ability to schedule it, we were told that maintenance would show up when convenient for them. When they arrived, I was in the middle of a meeting at home and could not have other occupants in the unit. They were actively adversarial about this and said, "this is the only time when we can do the work, if you can't let us in for 15 minutes now, we'll take you off the list and you'll just have to contact us if anything goes wrong". I'll say that if any of these issues had happened in isolation or were not part of a larger series of issues, they would be one off events that I would not make much of and the apartment would remain simply a good place for the money and location. However the pattern of events and the consistency of the inability to reach management, even for emergencies, makes it so that I am regrettably unable to recommend this location to anyone. There are a number of places I recommend to friends moving to the Boston area (good places I have lived in the past in Watertown and the North End). This is the first I have stayed at where I will not only not be renewing my lease, but will actively caution friends to avoid."

"It is a really great apartment complex to live. It is clean, safe, quiet and staff are all friendly. The rent is reasonable, the facility is pretty new. I would like to live here longer. Suggestion is if there is more activity and event for kids and family, it will be better."

"If I could leave 0 stars I would. If you are considering the Washingtons, don't. My husband and I have been trying to get a hold of management for 2 weeks now and after 4 different ways we still have heard nothing. No one is in the front office, they do not respond to the complaints we file, they do not respond to our emails, and the calls we made go to an overseas call center who just say to email the office, literally what is the point. Our upstairs neighbors have been throwing things out their window and all over ours. Our screen door is now covered in milk products and stinks. This has happened twice with management never getting back to us and/or assisting us at all."

"We’ve had a great experience, these first couple of days! It took us 3 days to move across the country to an apartment we had only seen online, and it was an incredible surprise. Ethan was kind and patient with us, the entire process, and we are more than thankful. Cheers!"