Apartment Review for River Place West - Arlington, VA

I’ve moved around quite a bit, including spending some time overseas, and this was far and away the worst building I’ve ever lived in. The plumbing is a complete joke. The water pressure in the shower is nonexistent, and I only occasionally had hot water. When I did get hot water, it usually took over five minutes to get flowing, and then disappeared as soon as I turned on the showerhead. The garbage disposal broke within days. The sinks backed up constantly, sometimes with no provocation (I wouldn’t even be using them and disgusting water would start geysering out of the drain.) When the unit below mine’s sink backed up, it would often affect my sink as well; by the end of my time there it was so bad that I stopped using the kitchen entirely because I was tired of spending an hour every day bailing sitting water out of the sink. The climate control is another problem. It’s building-wide, and some over-zealous engineer had it running at about 80 degrees all winter, making it stiflingly hot and dry in the building. There was no way to completely turn off the heat in my unit, because doing so can cause the fan coil to freeze and burst in cold weather. As a result, I had to keep my windows open all winter. This was made more frustrating by the fact that the building lies directly under the main approach route to Reagan Airport, so I was constantly berated by the roar of airplanes coming in to land about 500 feet above my window. The people in building management are nice enough, but it’s a ponderously complex and slow bureaucracy. Overall, I’ve never been happier about leaving a building that I was this one.