Moving from out of town in 2013, 3003 Van Ness had an appealing offer -- advertising a competitive rate with all utilities included, close to a metro and grocery.

While I'll explain the rest of our experience later, the highlight (or lowlight rather) for me is really the false advertising and deceitful pricing. Upon asking for our renewal rates after a year (and again after 2 years), we were informed that if we opted to go month to month (which is your legal right in DC, we would later find out) our "concession" of about $1000/month would vanish and we'd suddenly have a 50% increase in our rent. They coerced us into renewing for 12 months. Despite escalating it to the regional manager, we were not provided with any other options that year or in future years. We pointed out the double digit number of vacant available units renting for less than ours, but they did not care about anything other than how to squeeze us for more money. We'd later find out these practices would be investigated by the Attorney General.

When I moved into 3003 Van Ness in 2012, it was a lovely, convenient building with a responsive management company (one of the reasons I chose the building). By the time I moved out last year, I felt like was escaping dystopia.

What happened in the interim? Equity Residential, which perpetuated a massive rent scam on tenants, took over management of the building. They rented apartments to UDC without insisting UDC provide oversight for young people who had never lived alone in an apartment building before and thought they were in a college dorm (if you have a noise complaint about students partying at 2 am, Equity says to call the police rather than requiring UDC to step in and ensure the rest of the tenants are not suffering a decrease in their quality of life.)

Our experience started okay but progressively got worse

It was lovely at first – but later felt like a dystopia