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D.C. Apartment Hunting Advice

ZDeac

ZDeac

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Figured I'd throw this one out there to parallel the SF thread.

My wife and I are moving to D.C. in July and are working on finding a place. We are headed up there this weekend and have a couple of appointments lined up through Craigslist but are still feeling things out. Not quite sure how things will go this weekend.

We're looking to be somewhere in the Dupont/Woodley Park/Cleveland Park stretch of the Red Line (hopefully within a half mile of a Metro stop). 1 Bedroom for less than $2,500/mo.

Anything we should know before we start looking at places? Any questions we should be sure to ask at the appointments?

I think we've got a pretty strong D.C. contingent here on the boards. Your help is greatly appreciated!
 
With a budget like that you shouldn't have a problem. Those are some very nice but boring neighborhoods. Not a big fan of the Woodley area. Zero good restaurants and bars. No supermarket. Cleveland Park has some good eats, a movie theater, a couple of pubs and a small market along Connecticut Ave. I find Dupont pretty dull, but I can understand why people want to live there. Most of the restaurants are overpriced and not good.

With a budget like yours I'd consider stuff by the 14th street corridor/Logan circle/p street whole foods, too. Still a safe area, but there's more decent stuff to do nearby and your money will go further than Dupont. Only a 10-min walk from Dupont, plus you've got U street just as close. The Metro access right nearby thing is overrated.
 
I was mostly agree with what BDZ said. However, if you have a car and a parking space, the grocery store thing ain't bad in Woodley. I used to live there and would always shop at the teeter in Pentagon City. Woodley's biggest benefit for drivers is that it's right next to the entrance to Rock Creek Parkway. I could be to the teeter in 10 mins...kinda reminded me of living in Winston, but only in that respect.

That being said, walking to Whole Foods is great too if you find something in that area.
 
WFU03 said:
I was mostly agree with what BDZ said. However, if you have a car and a parking space, the grocery store thing ain't bad in Woodley. I used to live there and would always shop at the teeter in Pentagon City. Woodley's biggest benefit for drivers is that it's right next to the entrance to Rock Creek Parkway. I could be to the teeter in 10 mins...kinda reminded me of living in Winston, but only in that respect.

That being said, walking to Whole Foods is great too if you find something in that area.
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There's actually a Teeter in the Adams Morgan area now. I assume it has underground parking like the other two HTs in the city (NoMa and Capitol Hill). Don't know the exact intersection.

Agreed that with that budget you shouldn't have a problem. Disagree about Metro access not being important. It definitely depends on your job and commute. If you drive or walk to work every day, metro isn't that important (it's been so sucky on weekends recently it's almost not worth taking). But if you Metro to work, living close by can make your life so much easier (especially as it's getting warm and humid out, the longer the walk the grosser you get).

That being said, I do like the P St/Logan area. Lots of new bars and restaurants.
 
WFU03 said:
I was mostly agree with what BDZ said. However, if you have a car and a parking space, the grocery store thing ain't bad in Woodley. I used to live there and would always shop at the teeter in Pentagon City. Woodley's biggest benefit for drivers is that it's right next to the entrance to Rock Creek Parkway. I could be to the teeter in 10 mins...kinda reminded me of living in Winston, but only in that respect.

That being said, walking to Whole Foods is great too if you find something in that area.
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If you have a car, access to Rock Creek Parkway is huge, yeah. (Although they're doing construction on that Calvert Street entrance right now, so there's actually no entrance access temporarily.) But it's just as easy to get to Rock Creek from Cleveland Park or even Dupont depending on where you are.

There's a Safeway and Harris Teeter across the bridge from Woodley Park in Adams Morgan, too. Without a car, I'd find that kind of a pain, though.
 
LadyDeac03 said:
Disagree about Metro access not being important. It definitely depends on your job and commute.
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I guess so. Anywhere in that part of NW you're going to have easy access to good bus routes, which I tend to like better than Metro anyhow.

I was in the same boat as Z when I moved to D.C. and thought easy Metro access was the end-all, be-all, so I discounted a lot of cool neighborhoods right off the bat because they weren't a 5-minute walk from a station. That was a mistake, IMO.
 
bigdoublezero said:
If you have a car, access to Rock Creek Parkway is huge, yeah. (Although they're doing construction on that Calvert Street entrance right now, so there's actually no entrance access temporarily.) But it's just as easy to get to Rock Creek from Cleveland Park or even Dupont depending on where you are.

There's a Safeway and Harris Teeter across the bridge from Woodley Park in Adams Morgan, too. Without a car, I'd find that kind of a pain, though.
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When knew things would chance when you've been gone for years? ;)

I'm not sure I'd agree that Dupont has as easy access to RCP though. I used to work out in Reston and RCP was easily my favorite road in the area. It cuts getting out of the city time drastically (and is a pretty drive).
 
bigdoublezero said:
I guess so. Anywhere in that part of NW you're going to have easy access to good bus routes, which I tend to like better than Metro anyhow.

I was in the same boat as Z when I moved to D.C. and thought easy Metro access was the end-all, be-all, so I discounted a lot of cool neighborhoods right off the bat because they weren't a 5-minute walk from a station. That was a mistake, IMO.
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I would agree with this as well. When I lived in DC for a summer during law school, I lived in Truxton Circle (yeah, look that up) and worked in Dupont Circle. It would have made no sense to walk 10 minutes to the NY Ave metro and then take it around to Dupont when there was a great bus line that went right down P St. Buses are completely underrated in DC and have an undeserved negative stigma.
 
Thanks for the help guys.

One of the tough things for us right now is that neither of us really know D.C. Prior to this spring the only time either of us had been to D.C. was for a monument trip in middle school.

Our thought process right now is to find something we know works right now (i.e. close to the metro in an area we don't really have any significant concerns about) and over our first year re-evaluate and figure out what makes the most sense long-term.

I had definitely discounted the usefulness of busses. I appreciate hearing your opinions on them. We'll have to pay more attention to them this weekend.
 
Where will you guys be working? That might help for recommendations.
 
WFU03 said:
Where will you guys be working? That might help for recommendations.
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It would be nice to know that, but she's a consultant and I'm a public accountant (auditor) so we'll both be working at client sites the vast majority of the time. I could just as easily be somewhere and Maryland or Virginia, and it could change fairly often. Her clients will mostly be federal agencies which narrows it down a little bit but not that much.

We decided there really wasn't any way to plan it around where we'd work, so we just picked an area we thought we'd enjoy.
 
WFU03 said:
I'm not sure I'd agree that Dupont has as easy access to RCP though.
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P street and Mass ave have always worked for me. Guess it depends on your definition of easy.

Agreed that knowing where you're working would help. There are some really nice buildings in Penn Quarter that could easily fit the bill for 2500/mo.
 
One of my best friends lives in the Van Ness neighborhood right on Connecticut. There are some nice places there, convenient to Metro, close to grocery stores, he rents a parking space at this building, and I think his total rent is $1,600 for a nice 1 bedroom. It's a bit of an older building but nice. There are plenty of places around there. Van Ness may be a bit cheaper than other neighborhoods.

Some other friends are having a baby and just moved to Cleveland Park. They love it there.
 
I'll echo the P St./Logan Circle area. My office is about a block from Whole Foods and it seems like a really nice area. The 14th St. area is becoming a new hotbed for restaurants, with lots of new things opening all the time. About a 10 min walk to Dupont (and its Metro stop).

I don't know if I'd want to live in Penn Quarter. Yeah, there are a lot of nice buildings down there, but it can be pretty busy/loud late into the evening, plus there's no greenery around, although the Mall is close.
 
Yeah, if that's the case you want metro and pretty easy drivability.

I would say go for Dupont/Woodley/Cleveland Park, but make sure the place has parking included. All of those have fairly easy access to Rock Creek Parkway (as mentioned) so you can get to VA easily. They are all right on the red line and not too far out. While access to Maryland isn't great from that area, it isn't awful either. And, best of all, you should easily find a nice enough 1 bedroom place in your price range.
 
WFU03 said:
I would agree with this as well. When I lived in DC for a summer during law school, I lived in Truxton Circle (yeah, look that up) and worked in Dupont Circle. It would have made no sense to walk 10 minutes to the NY Ave metro and then take it around to Dupont when there was a great bus line that went right down P St. Buses are completely underrated in DC and have an undeserved negative stigma.
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This is the truth. I live in Glover Park and we have a number of buses in the neighborhood that are great. I can be in Dupont in 10 minutes if there is no traffic. At worst it's 20 or so minutes. Metro Bus is, in my opinion, so much more pleasant than Metro. Sure, it's not generally as fast, but during rush hour the Metro just blows (especially on the Red Line).
 
WFU03 said:
Yeah, if that's the case you want metro and pretty easy drivability.

I would say go for Dupont/Woodley/Cleveland Park, but make sure the place has parking included.
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How important is this going to be? Is street parking completely miserable in the area? I don't really mind if I have to park my car a block away, but if I'm not even going to be able to find a spot at 7:00 then that's a problem.
 
Depends on the neighborhood. In Dupont it's not good.

Honestly, $2,500 is a ton of money to spend in D.C. It's going to get you very far. Unless you've got serious champagne tastes, you can probably get by on much less and use that extra dough to pay for a parking spot or two.
 
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