The Mondrian

Pros — Management is nice and attentive. Apartments are nicely renovated. Clean Building. Convenient location to downtown.
Cons — Totally roach infested. Rent is way too high to come home to hundreds of roaches day after day. Management was sympathetic to the roach problem and exterminators came out every week, but they never went away.

I lived here from late-​January through the end of December. My landlady rented individual rooms in two-​bedroom apartments with the living area converted to a third bedroom.
The building has been «renovated» by an «investor» with «building managers» and an office in Brooklyn (how funny is it to receive a call from a «building manager» for a building in DC and have a NY number show up on your phone). This means grey paint, some cheap «marble”-ish finishings, and some stone-​ish tile replacing carpet in the hallways. In places, during my tenancy, the paint was already starting to chip. Oh, yeah, also a small gym and rooftop garden.
My bedroom door was so cheap that the humidity made it literally split in two. Our refrigerator lacked a handle. The window frames in my bedroom were cracked and there was a draft from the window behind my bed. My washing machine did not fill with water and twice the maintenance man insisted that it was «new» and there was nothing he could do.
If you live facing the alley (half the building and many of the master bedrooms), be prepared to wake up many mornings to slamming garbage dumpsters and trucks beeping. Felt like torture.
Towards the end of my tenancy, the left elevator started going straight to the 8^th floor (I lived on the 7^th), bounced up and then seemed to settle on the 7^th floor. It was terrifying and so I reported it to my landlady — and then it happened again. I never saw rodents, but my roommates who still live there now report that mice are present in the apartment.
Sadly, I learned after moving out, that my landlady was doing something that annoyed the «investor» in Brooklyn — namely, charging way too much rent and not returning the «profits» to the «investor» — and so I felt entirely screwed. (Yes, I chose to live here, but I am a short-​term consultant and so don’t have job security.) Apparently, now, the «investor» has renegotiated dramatically-​lower rents with tenants in these apartments, but will jack up the rent if one tenant leaves an apartment.
It’s really depressing to see that there are a lot of «young professionals» moving in and then a few older people and small families that, I assume, the «investor» has yet to succeed in pushing out.
If you want to live at the heart of DC’s appalling housing crisis — in a crappy 1980 building with some new paint — by all means go ahead and line the pockets of some jerk in Brooklyn who has plenty of money to sue my former crooked landlady, but not enough money to fix the elevators or, it seems based on recent reports, invest in pest control.
My landlady was a crook, the «investor» in Brooklyn is a jerk (when I called to ask for some compensation for being overcharged for a year, the building «manager» told me to call a lawyer), and I would not encourage anyone to live in this building where it seems providing quality, affordable housing is secondary to lining the pockets of a Brooklyn «investor.» This is a 1980 building — with all the cheap construction of the 1970s — and should be affordable housing. Instead, as I said, it’s being used as a piggy-​bank for some Brooklyn/​New York-​type who is rolling in money. What a nightmare.

I have been living in this complex the last 7 years. Jessica’s review was true in 2008 but I found some new info would be helpful. The building got improved significantly the last few years and I plan to stay here as long as I live in DC. Here are some thoughts:
Good:
— They renovated the building, now equipped with a brand new entrance, elevators, hallways, a well-​equipped gym, sauna, and a rooftop patio.
— They are refurbishing each apartment as it becomes vacant, putting nice hardwood floor and new kitchen, etc.
— Security, superintendents, the manager are nice and responsive.
— The location is awesome. It used to be on the fringe of the Dupont area but now the Logan Circle itself became a great neighborhood, close to Wholefoods, art galleries, healthy restaurants and new bars.
— Cool duplex & triplex structures, big windows and balconies.
— The rent is still on the affordable side … although it is getting more expensive as they renovate apartments.
Bad:
— The rent has gone up significantly.
— Some older apartments are still equipped with old carpets and kitchen.
— The building itself is a bit old — you can see it in the emergency stairs.
I never really encountered a sound issue or neighborhood problem. Maybe because of the funky structure of the building, the sound does not travel between apts (but it does between rooms within the same apt.) I wouldn’t say this is the best quality complex you can find in DC, but it is a pretty good one considering the location, equipment, and the rent.

The location and the cheap rent are the best things going for this place. I rented a decent-​sized studio there for 3 years and the experience was not terrible.
Good things —
Pretty decent apartment space — the size was nice and the layout worked. It even had a balcony.
Cheap rent that didn’t increase by more than $ 20 or $ 50 a year.
Location was convenient to the metro and the neighborhood is not bad and it is close to grocery stores. It’s also on a quiet corner and the brick façade kept out a lot of street noise.
Management was friendly and left you alone.
Parking in the garage was cheap.
According to rental websites they seem to never charge a deposit.
Laundry rooms are available on each floor and use cards so you don’t have to worry about finding quarters for the laundry.
Bad things —
Old, cheap apartment finishings. The carpet, bath fixtures, and kitchen were old. They worked but they weren’t very nice.
The elevator was ALWAYS broken or breaking.
There was no surveillance in the parking garage and people would break car windows looking for remotes to steal.
The management wasn’t very proactive in fixing problems like the broken elevators or performing preventative maintenance like pest control.
Because it was cheap it attracted a lot of college students or just-​out-​of-​college people who tended to be loud and sound carried through the walls. The security staff was good about asking people to quiet down if you needed them to.
I guess whether you like this place is a matter of what you want out of an apartment. If you want a downtown place that’s inexpensive with no bells and whistles this place is okay. I don’t think I would move back but it could have been worse.
I moved out in 2007 so some of these things may have changed or been fixed since then.