550 Review
I have neighbors directly above and below me (the units with my floorplan were the among the 1st to go when the apartment opened), so I think I can offer some unique perspective, since this apartment is only a few months old and I think most others here are in a luckier situation having no shared walls/floors/ceilings with other tenants.
Also I've been here for almost 4 months, the honeymoon period is over, and feel I can give a fair review (TL;DR: consider a unit with concrete flooring rather than wood, or stick to the top floor)
PROS
- Location: I mean, c'mon. The harbor is right across the street. Many restaurants along 6th street and probably more once the harbor reopens. The area is a bit quiet now, but hopefully more lively once the pandemic ends.
- Secure access. The lobby door and elevators require a key fob, and the apartment door requires a separate key fob. The parking garage uses a UHF RFID tag reader.
- Package lockers. Deliveries are placed in secure lockers similar to Amazon lockers, where you just need a PIN code to open.
- Safe area. Coming from DTLA and being a Citizen app user, it was a nice change going from an area constantly in the red (theft, stabbings, and general mayhem on the daily) to a completely green zone. Also probably helps there's LA Port Police a couple blocks down, and regularly see patrols during my daily walks.
- My electricity bills are lower compared to living in DTLA, since I don't have to use the AC as much as before. On certain days, the breeze catches just right and when I open my windows, I get a cool breeze running through my apartment.
- Nice gym (but I haven't been able to use it yet due to COVID)
- Leasing staff are top-notch and have a professional attitude
- The lobby, parking garage, common areas, and exterior are always spotless. Kudos to the maintenance team and please give them all raises.
CONS
- I'm in the southwest corner of the building and have very poor cell reception. 0-1 bars on T-Mobile. Would be nice if the apartment set up an external cell repeater antenna with repeaters throughout the inside of the building. Sending text messages often fail, and receiving sometimes comes in hours/days later, so you're better off only talking to blue bubble friends which uses the internet instead of SMS tech
- Construction shortcuts: Floors are super thin and not level. If you walk barefoot near the external facing walls and then walk away you can really notice the floors sag down. I used to think my upstairs neighbors were really stomping around, but after I got a complaint from my downstairs neighbor about "moving" noise coming from my bedroom, it turned out to be from my Roomba! So I'm shifting the blame on the stomping noise from my upstairs neighbor to these noise-amplifying floors. Case in point is the flooring under the washer/dryer (near the wall with sturdier flooring), as I can only just barely hear others washing machines. It really makes no sense to me that my 5 lb Roomba rolling along the floor can make more noise than a 200 lb washer/dryer on spin cycle, but it does. So i've been asked to reschedule my Roomba from the mid-morning to the late afternoon to accommodate my night-shift working neighbor.
- Construction shortcuts: Doors slam shut. The whole point of these pneumatic auto-door closers is to automatically close a door without slamming, but they do indeed slam. When my upstairs neighbor's door slams shut, I can feel my work desk shake, my wine glasses rattle, and the walls in my living room also rumble. A couple minutes spent adjusting the "latch speed" (the last 5-15 degrees of door closing) in the door pneumatics could prevent this.
- Construction shortcuts: Related to the thin floorboards, the flooring is starting to separate from the baseboards in higher traffic rooms, and there's a gap of 2-3mm in some parts. The only room that doesn't have gaps between the floors and baseboard is the bathroom.
- Construction shortcuts: we had our first rain a couple weeks ago and now the view outside is pretty funky with water spots obscuring the view. Just wish they had applied some hydrophilic coating to these windows before they were installed
- Deliveries sometimes don't end up in the lockers. This usually happens with Amazon drivers, where packages are either left outside the building or in the mail room left in a pile, without placing them inside the secure lockers
I'm still on the fence regarding renewing my lease. I previously lived in DTLA apartment built in the 1920s, so it had solid concrete floors and walls, and didn't hear a thing (except for the street noise outside), so I guess I can consider myself a bit noise-sensitive after living in a noise-isolated place for 5 years.
I don't quite feel like this is my home yet. And now my implied 19-hour quiet hour window of 10pm-5pm to be a good neighbor certainly doesn't help (normally, quiet hours are 10pm-8am). Time will tell. read more