It will be months, maybe even years, before investigators and courts sort out who should share in the blame for at least three Aurora apartment complexes becoming unlivable slums, overrun with vermin, garbage, neglect and crime.
City lawmakers are partly culpable in the disaster.
Three apartments, all owned in some fashion by New York company CBZ, have for months been at the center of a controversy in northwest Aurora that has falsely painted the city as a mecca for Venezuelan gang crime and urban decay.
While the crux of the storm is clearly the mismanagement of three large rental properties, the political narrative has focused on Venezuelan immigrants living in the apartments.
The Denver metro area was besieged with more than 40,000 immigrants during the last two years, many from Venezuela, trafficked to the region by Texas state officials. The Texas government purposely bused immigrants crossing the Mexican border to Denver, Chicago, New York and other “Democratic” cities in a sadistic and dangerous “revenge” scheme that has yet to be curtailed.
About a year ago, these migrants began making their way to homes across the metro area, including in Aurora.
It’s so far unclear how or why Denver-based non-profit agencies placed a large concentration of Venezuelan migrants in three Aurora buildings owned by CBZ, whether those units were properly inspected before renters were placed there, and whether arrangements were made for poor and struggling immigrants to thrive, often without work credentials or support systems.
As living conditions deteriorated at CBZ apartment complexes — Aspen Grove, The Edge at Lowry and Whispering Pines — a public narrative began to make its way to the social media and far-right news universe, focusing on anti-immigrant politics.
Promoted first by Aurora Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky, the anti-immigrant hysteria became part of Donald Trump’s national campaign. During a rally in Aurora in October, where Trump falsely claimed the city was overrun by Venezuelan gangs, Trump said “Operation Aurora” would be the name of a national mass-deportation plan, if elected.
Months after all this, confusion grew about just how serious gang problems are and why conditions at the apartments became so dire. Now, a clearer picture is emerging.
A Sentinel report last week revealed that conditions at the Aspen Grove complex — shuttered by the city in August because of problems so dire the building was deemed uninhabitable — have been documented going back as long as four years, and possibly longer.
The problem of slummy Aurora rentals is hardly new. The city has pushed hard to ensure landlords provide safe rentals for decades. But Aurora has never seen anything like this debacle.
City and other records show that CBZ was notified dozens of times about dire conditions at the complex before Venezuelan immigrants even began moving into the complex.
Similarly, other CBZ properties also have a lengthy trail of neglect and serious problems, documented by city code enforcement officials in Aurora, and Denver.
The problem at Aspen Grove became so dire over a year ago, that after a tour of the property by Mayor Mike Coffman and other city officials, former Councilmember Juan Marcano sponsored legislation targeting the problem there and at other area apartment units.
The legislation would have created a registry of apartment buildings and owners in an effort to clean up longstanding livability problems.
The measure would have required apartment owners to pay for private, regular inspections of the complexes and individual units to ensure they are habitable.
Licensing fees associated with the proposal would have allowed the city to double the number of code inspectors currently on staff. Former city officials say that a shortage of staffing resources has long been a problem, and that some properties in Aurora go years without being inspected for livability.
The cost of the program, if passed directly onto renters, would have been about $7.29 per rental unit per month, according to a rental rights group following the failed effort to create a legislative fix for the problem. It’s a fee that could be easily absorbed from profits made by property owners. Or, it’s a fee most, if not all, renters would gladly pay to ensure they have heat, plumbing and a place to live not overrun by vermin and filth.
Programs like this have made huge headway in protecting vulnerable renters and cracking down on notorious slumlords in other metro cities.
A majority of city council members, some who’d toured the noxious apartments, voted down the proposal, arguing that it was unfair to rental-property owners, and that the current system in the city was adequate.
“I think what’s happening now is working,” Jurinsky said during a November 2023 city council meeting.
Clearly, Jurinsky and others pushing back against the proposal, were dead wrong.
In what appears to have been a concerted effort to protect property owners from their responsibility as landlords, Jurinsky and others discounted the needs and rights of renters, and a way to hold both qualified and unqualified landlords accountable.
The result of the city council’s mistake helped create the catastrophe that has affected everyone in Aurora who now is forced to explain what the city is actually like, outside of mismanaged apartment complexes the city cannot hold to account.
As Mayor Mike Coffman has pointed out, the problem and exaggeration of the problem could have real consequences on business development and property values across the city.
The media has already made clear how these slums have affected the residents living there.
The lack of foresight in turning away from such an obvious problem with such a workable solution is lamentable. But that this misguided and suspect turn of events helped create the current crisis a reality is beyond regrettable.
Had the city been able to intervene in the summer of 2023 when the brewing calamity was already so obvious, it’s easy to see that none of the following cavalcade of calamity might have followed. At worst, the problem would have been mitigated and not become a campaign tool for Jurinsky and Trump.
Aurora lawmakers need to bring back the measure immediately, provide public hearings so that everyone in the community can comment on the proposal. Lawmakers must close this rental-property loophole that will only create more problems for local renters and the entire community if it’s not addressed.
In case people don’t get the drift of this CBZ apartment fiasco, it’s simple. It had numerous fingers in the pie, and now here comes finger pointing and shift the blame to the other guy. Three big fat fingers- CBZ companies, The City of Aurora, and a couple non-profits. The Sentinels belief just add more city employees to the payroll and that will tighten up rental property standards using city law with a new reinforced department with new amazing power. The city of Aurora already with their regulatory supervision aka code enforcement attempted a stab at municipal prosecution of Zev Baumgarten last August 16, for violations five years old. It was on the docket and didn’t happen. Some 90 problems over the past five years of city code violations and nothing was done demonstrated a case of municipal malpractice. This was a joint venture of CBZ and Aurora to produce this level of city embarrassment. It doesn’t matter how many people would have been on the payroll. This is what the current culture created from the relaxed policy of poor city enforcement and we see plenty of other slum and squalor making its way into neighborhoods, nothing different, it’s the same process. What is truly needed is accountability, not more people.
Is there a reason the “Denver-based non-profit agencies” weren’t named in an article that seems to name everyone else that may or may not have contributed to the problem?