The Prescott Apartments

I’m not quite sure how we lasted a year here.
They’re beautiful apartments but it’s overpriced, noisy, lacks parking — which eventually forces you to pay almost $ 100 a month to park in the garage, lacks privacy if you lived on the first floor, and quality of the appliances are poor quality — our cabinets came apart and our closet rack fell apart a few times. The only thing I miss about living here is the location!

I moved into The Prescott shortly after it opened. There were a few hiccups at first when the old manager was still around but everything was resolved quickly for me by the building owners and other employees. Since Kate has been in charge everything is wonderful.
The apartment location is perfect. Right outside front the door is a max stop which takes you right into downtown. There are also great routes for biking into downtown from here. It’s also really close to Mississippi and Alberta. Interstate itself is being built up as well so there are lots of new things to do close by.
I’ve lived in a lot of apartments and I think these are the best ones by far. It’s a given that you will hear your neighbors at least a little bit in apartments but these are the most quiet ones I’ve been in. Before I moved in, the leasing agent let us in to the empty surrounding apartments to bang on the walls and walk across the floor to see how if it was loud and I was happy with how soundproof it was. I’ve been here for over a year and half now and have no issues with noise myself.
The building itself has a lot of great amenities too. There’s a big open courtyard with a racquetball and bocce ball court. There’s also a fire pit, two grills, and lots of covered seating and lounge chairs. There’s also a fitness center in the building!
This place is also really pet friendly, so there’s tons of cute dogs and cats around :)

Noisy — it looks «nice» but is severely lacking in any noise insulation. Cheap wood I-​beam type ceilings/​floor, doesn’t hold a candle to concrete construction, but it’s priced like a premium building, I presume because the rental grade appliances have «stainless» covers.
Also hope that you have the same schedule as whoever lives above/​near you, because you will be hearing their every movement and enjoying the sound of them assembling their furniture or starting their shower.
The building also has a «security system» with «cameras» but the images are roughly half as sharp as the video taken of the moon landing. We’ve had several (so far…) smash and grab sprees of the parking garage by other lovely North Portland residents, and Prescott tenants get treated to video stills of what can best be described as a human-​shaped object carrying lots of stolen bags and backpacks. The same human shaped object wandered the halls for a while looking for unlocked apartments before disappearing into the night.
The previous apartment manager (Jay) was a supreme dickbag, luckily he’s recently left. So that’s a point in the «plus» column… the rest of the staff is friendly enough.
The management company’s head office is incredibly disorganized — late/​missing lease renewal paperwork, requested modifications to the lease (ie, parking/​storage space changes) not being reflected in the bill, and the icing on the cake — random fire alarms!
This prompted my review today, it’s been almost a year of putting up with varying degrees of annoyances from this place, but a full day-​long fire alarm test of every alarm in the building (without any notice) was too much. Needless to say my dog didn’t enjoy being trapped in the unit with the alarm going off every couple of minutes. Luckily I came home for lunch to help him escape with what was left of his sanity. Had we been given any advanced warning it wouldn’t have been hard to make other arrangements.
Nothing particularly positive to say about this place other than its proximity to the MAX station.
If you can find another place to live, I’d recommend doing so — it’ll probably be cheaper as well!
If you absolutely have to live within spitting distance of an Interstate Ave MAX station, go a little further north or south, there’s plenty of other buildings to choose from.