The Standard at Seattle — Local services in Seattle

Sadly, the place is falling apart. They marketed the apartment heavily during the first few months of opening and all the earlier 5 star reviews are from that period. However, with time the quality and service has severely degraded.

The Standard is good to live in SOLELY due to its location, few amenities (particularly the gym and air conditioning in every unit) , and prices (depending upon when you sign the lease). However, these points are strongly decimated due to illegal and deceptive business practices (more on this below) as well as poor/lack of communication from the office. Often, I have to call over 5-6 times to get someone on the phone as they have one line. They do not respond to emails ever (unless being threatened to sue; for example, when my heating did not work in 40F temperature in January, I was told that the problem was that it was too cold outside to heat inside. However, this was not true as when I told them that I was going to move to a hotel due to unlivable conditions in my unit and that I would send them the bill and that if they didn't pay I would take them to small claims court and a judge will decide what should be done, the heating issue was resolved within the next 30 minutes).

Their deceptive practices are evidenced by the fact that they recently took pictures of the apartment amenities, including the pool, and advertised them on their website. This is deceptive as the pool is not, and has never been, open for use.

Their illegal practices include pressuring and coercing current tenants to renew their leases over 7 months in advance of their lease expiration by stating that their respective units won't be available for a renewal after a certain arbitrary date. However, this is contrary to local laws as the SMC states that the landlord cannot offer a lease to a third-party before 60-90 days of lease expiration. I did make their office aware of this, however, they blatantly ignored the law and forced MANY tenants (college students) to sign a renewal lease.

As if this were not enough, when certain tenants (like myself) asserted their right to a renewal lease between 60-90 days before lease expiration and threatened to sue in court (landlord is liable to pay 3 months rent to the tenant if a renewal lease is not offered by the landlord between 60-90 days before lease expiration), the management then had no choice but to provide renewal leases. When they did provide a renewal lease, they increased the rent by $60 per month. However, this was also not legal since they did not provide proper notice of rent increase (landlord must provide a written notice of rent increase 180 days prior to increasing the rent). When this was pointed out, they kept mentioning that they were waiting for a response from their corporate management. When after 10 days, the renewal lease was not edited to reflect a legal amount, landlord was served with a written "intent to sue" legal notice with a 5-day deadline and the lease was edited to the original rate within 3 days.

However, since they had already offered and executed leases for the same unit with other third-parties, the management then went on to displace these third-parties to other undesirable unit types. Meaning, they had N beds of a certain unit type, but had executed leases with N+1 people. For example, they had to displace some tenants who had a unit with a window facing outside the building to a (nearly) windowless room (some bedrooms have window on top of the bedroom entry door to comply with the building and housing code that dictates that there should be a window in every room).

Like I said, if you want to live here due to the aforementioned virtues, you should be prepared to call them 5-6 times just to talk to someone, threaten to sue to even get the most basic work done, read up on local landlord-tenant laws to not be taken advantage of, and most importantly, have the patience to write such long and appalling reviews on Google to warn other people of The Standard's deceptive and illegal business practices and overall...

PLEASE. WHOEVER SEES THIS. RECONSIDER LIVING HERE. These people incentivize good reviews and pay people for 5 stars. Do not trust them. I do not ever write reviews for any establishment; this is my first, and for very good reason.

Living here, the Standard has: illegally trespassed into the inside of my car for a mistake that they made made "luxury living" into prisoncellcore(no room has an openable window and AC never worked) threatened to tow my car while I was at home They charged me utility bills even after I moved out

Entering my car without consent: When I first got to the Standard, I was assigned an initial parking spot that I was content with, until chemicals started dripping from the ceiling and leaving semi-permanent marks on the paint of my car (i had to vigorously scrub off whatever chemical residue that was dripping from the ceiling).

I notified management of this issue to which they assigned me to a new spot, which was considerably more compact than the tiny spaces they gave us already and made getting in and out nearly impossible; the spot they gave me was unused for a reason. To give you context I drive a Mazda Miata. Yes. It was REALLY that tiny. I brought this up with management to which they changed my spot again to the first floor and nowhere near my tower, but I was content with it as long as I would have no more problems. Dealing with Standard Management was so exhaustive that I had neither the time or energy to bring it up once more.

Then, at 5 pm a few days later after moving me, I got a text asking me if I could move my car since the parking pass in my car was causing the gate to open. Since I was in a class, I couldn't make it down to the garage by 7 pm, to which I saw my parking pass had been ripped out. Infuriated, I called management and asked why they had taken my parking pass. The manager said they had "tried calling me", which they had not. I never once turned my phone off and had no records of any contact. This means that Standard ILLEGALLY ENTERED MY CAR AND TOOK MY PARKING PASS. Though I considered filing a police report I knew nothing would come of it, so I asked management to give me a spot that would not have any more complications as I was done with the headache the Standard had given me already.

The tow: Two weeks before I left to go to my home out of state, I wanted to make arrangements to keep my car in the garage over the summer. I talked with an employee who spent 20 minutes talking with management "in the back"(I only remember because it made me late to class) and the employee came back out saying I was cleared to park there over the summer without any complications. However, knowing Standard's unbelievably negligent management practices in the past, I went back to the lobby a few days before I left to confirm that I could in fact park in the garage.

When I went to check again the employee working at the front desk once more told me that it "should be fine", but I should check in with the garage parking manager before. I did not understand why I had to do this considering management already knew, so I begrudgingly emailed Grace McManus, the parking manager. Again, this was due to Standard's and Grace's consistent history of negligence. Grace emailed me back saying that no one was allowed to park in the garage over the summer to which I replied that I had already received authorization from management beforehand about this.

She did not respond to me for a month despite constant followup emails, both to her and the Standard itself. I can only imagine this was intentional considering I had cc'd every email associated with The Standard due to sheer anxiety that Grace would call a tow truck without notifying me. Finally, I was forced to fly back to Seattle, move the car, and fly back after Grace set a deadline to tow in a week after a month of not responding to me.

I wish I could say more but there is simply not enough characters to describe all of the Standard's shortcomings. Please. Reconsider living here and go somewhere more well...

I've never left a review on Google like this before, but I felt so compelled to do so by the utter lack of competence with which this building is run that this review can best be described as an act of catharsis.

Firstly, the package room is an absolute nightmare. Packages are supposed to be organized by last name, but they are instead strewn about on the floor and on random shelves, and they are too easily lost and/or stolen. I find it safer and more convenient to have my packages sent to my friend's place 20 minutes away and to walk there and back than to have them sent to the very building that I live in. Also, the door to the package room was left unlocked and could be accessed by anybody without a code--including non-residents who made it into the building--for a long period of time. This might not be the case anymore (I wouldn't know because I haven't used the package room in over 6 months), but it nonetheless is shocking that a supposed luxury apartment cares so little about the security of its residents' packages that it leaves the door to the package room unlocked for anybody to enter.

Secondly, nothing works. The modern look of the building's interior masks its dysfunctionality. There are too few elevators, and at least one of the three is always out of service in the north tower, so there are effectively only 2 elevators. The one that is broken most often squeaks and shakes like there's an earthquake. One of my roommates had a leak so bad that water flooded his room and filled the hallway leading to the kitchen, then seeped through the floor into the units below ours. Our dishwasher and washing machine then subsequently started to leak. Another one of my roommates reported a cracked window. My key sometimes decides not to work. Both the trash and recycling chutes in the garbage room are always locked, likely because someone on a floor above left it open, so trash piles up in the garbage room. Somebody shot the glass out of the south tower's front door, and it still isn't repaired. The north tower's front door resists opening if it has just closed. My room has a loud, dusty fan built in that drones on loudly through the night, and I can't disable it. The walls in my room are so thin that I can kick them lightly and leave a shallow dent. They might as well be made of paper. When the pea-brained tenants in the next unit over slam their door, the wall vibrates so much that I can feel it. The bedroom and bathroom doors inexplicably have two locks, and one can be unlocked from the other side simply by sticking a key (or other thin, rigid solid, like a strip of metal) into the groove and twisting.

When you tell a child to clean his room, you may find that his idea of "cleaning" is to hide the all the detritus--his toys, trash, food--in his closet and close it so that the room appears to be clean at first glance until one looks in the closet and finds that the room is no cleaner than before. This apartment building is precisely that room--it is what a child would think to do if told to manage an apartment building. He hides the dysfunctionality of this "luxury" apartment behind a clean, modern look and hopes you won't look in the closet to find all the building's egregious flaws.

As expected, writing this comically long review has proven cathartic. I hate this building passionately, and I have built up so much anger and frustration toward it over a 10–11-month span that I could not refrain from expressing it in some way. I doubt this review will be useful to anybody, but it has served its...