AURORA | A company that owns three blighted apartment complexes in Aurora has, with help from Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky, spent three months in the conservative spotlight blaming what police and city officials say is its mismanagement and neglect on a Venezuelan prison gang.
Once right-wing stump speeches about the city’s fictional takeover by Tren de Aragua end after Tuesday’s election, however, questions remain locally as to how CBZ Management was able to rack up what officials say are 102 code violations over four years in one complex and whether the city needs tougher laws against landlords that chronically ignore enforcement efforts.
Colorado’s Attorney General’s office has, in the meantime, launched a consumer investigation into CBZ.
“Aurora still hasn’t addressed its slumlord problem,” said Juan Marcano, a former city council member who tried raising the issue before leaving office late last year. “This conversation is long overdue.”
A city of renters
Nearly 40% of condos, houses, townhouses and apartments in Aurora are rentals, according to city records.
Aurora’s Housing and Community Services Department is responsible for periodically checking multi-family rental housing for basics such as whether they’re structurally sound, furnaces and plumbing are working, smoke detectors are installed, trash is collected and pests are under control. Code enforcement inspections protect tenants’ health and safety and, in many cases, serve as the only way to keep landlords accountable for maintaining their properties.
The department had 24 inspectors in 2008 when Aurora’s population was about 300,000. It now has 18, plus one vacancy, and more than 400,000 people living in the city. That’s 21% fewer inspectors despite a nearly 35% spike in population. City government couldn’t provide numbers on growth in multi-family rental properties during that period.
“It’s out of whack,” said Marcano, a longtime community and housing activist.
Short-staffing isn’t new to Aurora.
Margee Cannon, who worked alongside Aurora’s team of code enforcement officials from 1989 to 2019, told the Sentinel that “not having enough inspectors was always a problem” for the department. One reason for the shortage, she said, is that the Republicans who’ve typically controlled Aurora’s council have opted to keep city staff as small as possible. A shift in federal funding priorities has also affected staffing. About five years ago, city officials say, the U.S. Department Housing and Urban Development ended block grants that funded inspectors specifically in northwest Aurora, home to many of the city’s oldest and most blighted complexes.
Sandra Youngman, then the city’s code enforcement supervisor, notified the city council about the inspector shortage last year.
“Obviously we have some staffing issues. If we had more staff, that would certainly be beneficial to be able to get into more units more often,” she said during a September 2023 meeting of the Housing, Neighborhood Services and Redevelopment Policy Committee.
John Wesolowski, the department’s deputy director, last month acknowledged that hiring more inspectors would still help address problems with persistently blighted properties like CBZ Management’s Aspen Grove apartment complex at 1568 Nome St. The city shut it down in August after four years of a variety of violations. Tenants and city inspectors documented consistent and widespread rat, mouse and cockroach infestations in the property, along with piles of garbage, dangerous electrical and plumbing issues and other health and safety issues they say repeatedly went unaddressed by CBZ.
Citing a city policy preventing staffers from commenting on issues that may be perceived as political, however, Wesolowski was reluctant to say Aurora needs more inspectors than council members are willing to fund.
“If you ask any division or department in the city if they needed more staff, they’d say yes,” he said. “We’re all in the same boat.”
The city government in the meantime has no fixed requirement for the frequency of rental inspections.
“The next inspection year is set dependent on the condition of the property at the time of the inspection,” said city spokesperson Ryan Luby. The department does its best to inspect rentals “on a one-to-five year basis,” depending on the age and location of a building and the number of complaints it receives. But, because of staffing shortages and other priorities, it takes the city longer than five years to inspect some rentals.
Landlord registry proposal
Slammed with complaints from renters, Marcano — then the Ward IV council member who unsuccessfully challenged Mike Coffman for mayor last year — proposed a way to beef up city inspections and build in more accountability for landlords.
In September 2023, he introduced a bill to create a residential rental licensing program for apartment complexes, multi-unit structures and any other type of home where two or more dwelling units in the same structure are for rent. Owners would have to become certified with the Housing and Community Services Department, allowing officials for the first time to keep track of the number of rental units in the city and provide someone to contact if renters have grievances.
To qualify for the registry, property owners would have needed to have their properties inspected by private home inspectors and verifiy that their units met city codes. They also would have had to pay a $100 annual fee on properties with 10 or fewer units; $250 on those with 11-50 units; $350 on those with 51 to 250 units; and $500 on those with more than 250 units. Revenues from those licensing fees, plus $50 registry application fees would have provided enough funding to double the number of city inspectors and free up the inspection staff to address more renters’ complaints.
The plan would have guaranteed rental complexes are inspected at least every four years, or more if ownership turns over.
“Given the amount of slums in the city of Aurora, we need far more inspection and enforcement,” Marcano said.
Speaking in favor of the proposal last year, organizers with United for a New Economy (UNE) — a Commerce City-based nonprofit that helps residents advocate for better living conditions — said it would have come out to about $7.29 per rental unit a month if a landlord chose to pass the cost on to renters. The group said tenants, even those with low incomes, likely would have embraced an increase because complaining about housing conditions tends to prompt rent hikes, anyway. The group also noted that many tenants, especially undocumented immigrants, fear landlords will evict or report them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if they demand repairs.
The licensing program “would remove the threat of retaliation” and bring a “more proactive approach” to addressing problems with rental properties “before they become serious” like at Aspen Grove, Alex Georgiadis, a policy analyst for the group told council members.
Similar programs have been launched in Denver, Boulder and cities elsewhere in the U.S., and are being lauded for cracking down on slumlords.
Denver has incrementally launched its certification program in the last 18 months, and all landlords in that city — even those renting out only one dwelling— must participate. Since 2023, some 24,184 rental property owners have become licensed there, giving code enforcement officials more power to ensure safe conditions in more than 176,000 units citywide.
“The program gives us more tools in our tool box so we can one day say we have the safest rental properties in America,” Denver’s Excise and Licensing spokesman Eric Escudero said. “We haven’t eliminated all slumlords in Denver, but now there’s more accountability than before.”
Denver also has increased its maximum daily fine for property owners who chronically ignore its health and safety codes to $5,000. Aurora’s highest daily penalty is $2,650.
Aurora’s registry rejected by city lawmakers
By the time Aurora’s City Council discussed the registry proposal at a November 2023 study session, at least five council members — Marcano, Mayor Mike Coffman, Crystal Murillo, Ruben Medina and Angela Lawson — had toured Aspen Grove. Tenants showed them structural problems, including a third-story walkway detaching from the building. They pointed out black mold and a toilet so leaky that the flooring around it was caving into the apartment below.
“Residents shared stories with us that included spending the winter without heat in their units, an absent or unresponsive landlord, and a laundry room residents could not use because it was covered in human waste,” said Allex Luna, organizing director with UNE, which led council members on the tours.
City staff let the entire council know at the study session that CBZ continued to ignore years of city efforts requiring that it bring Aspen Grove up to code. The company was increasing rents in the complex up to $1,700 a month without making improvements, organizers told the council.
Jurinsky opposed the registry proposal on grounds that, “It feels there wasn’t much stakeholder input before bringing this ordinance forward.”
Asked what stakeholders she was referring to, she cited the South Metro Denver Realtors Association and “a couple other groups and organizations.”
UNE and other community organizers had run the proposal by renters and groups representing tenants directly affected by slumlords. All, UNE said, supported it.
“If a thousand door knocks and 300 individual conversations isn’t stakeholding, I don’t know what is,” Murillo told Jurinsky.
“I feel like this was stake held from the jump,” Marcano added.
“Well that’s just not how our stakeholders are feeling, and you don’t get to decide their feelings for them, Juan,” said Jurinsky.
“I think what’s happening now is working,” she added about the city’s enforcement efforts.
“It’s very clear that what we have is not working,” countered Councilmember Alison Coombs, citing continuing blighted conditions at Aspen Grove and the “many, many people in the city” living in unsafe buildings.
Coffman agreed with Jurinsky that the status quo on enforcement efforts was sufficient. The city’s approach on “the multi-family side” — meaning apartment complexes like Aspen Grove, as opposed to single-single family homes for rent — “seems to be taken care of,” he said.
“So I think on the multi-family part, I think we’re covered. That’s just my opinion,” he added, saying he was only interested in potentially drafting new inspection requirements for single-family rentals.
Trying to muster support for Marcano’s proposal, Murillo noted the considerable “staff time and city dollars” required “to have to go in and do something about a really poorly maintained property” like Aspen Grove.
“We’re trying to be more resourceful and do something proactive instead of” reactive, she said.
Ultimately, the council’s conservative majority shot down the plan.
“It think it’s going to require some more discussion than we can have here at this meeting,” Coffman said.
Discussion over a brewing crisis never happened
That discussion hasn’t taken place a year later, even though CBZ’s continued disregard of code enforcement efforts forced the city to make the unprecedented move of shutting Aspen Grove down in August. City officials deemed the complex unsafe and uninhabitable, leaving hundreds of residents displaced.
“Nowhere to go. We’re desperate,” one tenant, a recent migrant from Venezuela, told the Sentinel after being booted from the complex — the first home he, his wife and two young kids had known in the United States.
The city paid for his family and most others to stay in hotels through the end of August.
CBZ has blamed blight conditions at Aspen Grove and two other complexes it owns in northwest Aurora — the Edge at Lowry and Whispering Pines — on alleged violent takeovers by members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, also known as TdA.
Jurinsky promulgated the narrative, falsely claiming on conservative local and national news shows, and social media, that TdA had overrun parts of the city. The story became a popular talking point among right-wing candidates seeking to win votes on anti-immigrant sentiment.
Donald Trump has often repeated it on the campaign trail, attempting to link Aurora with all that’s wrong with U.S. immigration policy and making the city a national symbol for what he claims, contrary to U.S. Justice Department statistics, is rampant violence and murder perpetrated by migrants. He called for a federal “Operation Aurora” to root out and deport undocumented immigrants not just from the city, but from all over the United States.
Contrary to those claims, however, records show Aspen Grove had started racking up code enforcement complaints long before the influx of Venezuelans to Aurora in the last two years. City officials say they have investigated at least 121 code enforcement cases at the complex since 2020 and found 102 code violations. Many of the violations were for critical health and safety issues. All those citations, city officials note, stem from tenants’ complaints, not from regularly scheduled inspections.
Although Aspen Grove has been slapped with far more violations than any other complex in Aurora, city records show several other complexes have similarly chronic code problems that have gone unaddressed by their owners.
Waiting years to crack down on unresponsive landlords takes a toll on residents living without heat, plumbing or other basic housing needs, rental activists said. Many residents have repeatedly held that substandard living conditions in the buildings, not Venezuelan gang activity, has been their greatest concern.
“We’re afraid of your mayor and of the cockroaches and rats in our apartments, not of gangs,” Gladis Tovav, a resident of the CBZ’s The Edge at Lowry complex, told the Sentinel in September after Coffman echoed some of Jurinsky’s false narratives.
The mayor since has walked back claims that TdA overran that property, publicly referring to CBZ as a “slumlord.”
The city’s years of back and forth with CBZ also has taken what City Attorney Pete Schulte calls “a ton of staff time” and “many months, if not years” of summonses and other legal and administrative work.
“It’s a heavy, heavy load,” he said.
Four years after CBZ’s first code violations and twelve months after Coffman said the code enforcement process “seems to be taken care of,” the city is still pursuing multiple summonses and complaints to charge the company fines for property negligence and expenses the city racked up for services at its three complexes in Aurora. Its plans to shut down the Edge at Lowry like it did Aspen Grove were postponed after US Bank sued CBZ’s subsidiaries for a default on a loan that resulted in receivership of one of the buildings in the Edge and the Whispering Pines property.
Meanwhile, three months of national and even international headlines about Aurora’s blighted rental conditions have not prompted any city official to propose legislation that would prevent code violations from spinning so out of control that the city needs to shut down another apartment complex.
Community organizers, however, say the scapegoating and political football triggered by CBZ in recent months won’t keep them from pressing for more renter protections.
“We have clearly seen in both Nome Street and across Aurora that our current systems were not working and continue to not work to keep corporate landlords in check. This program was needed then and it’s needed now,” UNE’s Luna told the Sentinel. “We still believe that an ordinance that creates a landlord registry would help protect renters across Aurora by protecting resident health and safety for all, improving landlord-tenant transparency and relationships, and improving property values.”
Given the black eye the CBZ controversy has brought to the city, Marcano said, “it makes me crazy” the council hasn’t come together to tighten code enforcement laws.
“We gave them an opportunity to address these issues last year. Instead of doing that, they killed the proposal and now they’re defending the slumlord instead of defending the people living in those properties,” he said. “It shows where their priorities are and that this is a city council more interested in protecting their donors than their constituents.”
Sentinel staff writer Cassandra Ballard contributed to this report.
It’s very apparent to me: One reason for the shortage, she said, is that the Republicans who’ve typically controlled Aurora’s council have opted to keep city staff as small as possible.
And Mr Marcano HAD A PLAN. Looks like it was a viable plan with funds to the city to make it work AND using private contractors to get the job done!
But, no, the republicans didn’t want to do that. Pretty obvious isn’t it?
So, adding yet another level of government bureaucracy is supposed to fix this issue. Likely not gonna happen. The city will piss that extra income away on other initiatives.
Good luck finding inspectors (although perhaps this could be a forced labor opportunity for the homeless in the city). Aurora is becoming a cesspool of lowlifes who don’t want to be policed and want crime to run rampant. The best solutions to deal with the problems are the ones that aren’t legal. Such a shame.
This Sunday’s Denver Post front page leading article “Denver Post Special Report” by three reporters shines a bright light on the epic story of Aurora’s missing the ability to recognize, much less do something to correct the snowball effect of the CBZ fiasco. This city and its inner workings to let things slide have become world famous into exactly what the Post’s three- page article lays out, page by page. The CBZ company and their apartment’s history in Aurora and its slow meltdown proved to us one thing.
Whereas the city shows us their weak drive on code enforcement, they are however impressive with strong spin and excuses. The cities routine displays years of a mediocre enforcement policy. You have to ask, how much of this is has been politically driven to be relaxed, fundamentally sloppy? Ending with years of deferred enforcement. Thus, good strong standards, that citizens expect, the city code demands, were put aside, hoping things would just get better. This put-it-off for another day city philosophy finally came to an end. What-a-memorable-crescendo! More reporters piled on this than most stories in years, and still more to come. Further, it was suggested the city as to create a rental registry for more control, and easy to apply city pressure. This shows us how really confused the city is at running anything. These CBZ buildings already were registered businesses and held the required city business licenses to operate, which the city gladly renewed every year. The city looks as if they couldn’t figure out to suspend these licenses as the licenses have conditions, and as it’s unlawful for CBZ in Aurora without the current certificate, an immediate closed for business.
The Colo AG has been put into a position that now their office has an ongoing investigation. The AG’s office has already issued subpoenas to CBZ looking at violations of “safe-housing and consumer protection laws”. Aurora records through production of documents their own code enforcement department and legal dept will face audits and review by the AG’s office. Then we will also start to find out if and how much Aurora has spent of taxpayer money paying for housing of hundreds of CBZ’s evicted tenants they put out of the Nome St. apartment and into surrounding hotels? Something so-far, they are keeping tight-lipped about. Another Story…..
It’s about time.
Margee Cannon says: Republicans who’ve typically controlled Aurora’s council have opted to keep city staff as small as possible.
Clearly, cutting regulations for rental properties is not in the interest of Aurora. Short-sighted goals to save money on inspectors is not yielding a net savings. The cost of pandering to slumlords by Conservatives is costing the city more in the long-run and running down the physical assets of neighborhoods. Again, Danielle Jurinski led the way to block a plan to increase inspection and to force more accountability. Tell me again, what positive thing is she doing on this council?
Please vote. I grew up in this city- K-12 & graduated from APS over 30 years ago. I proudly gave Aurora nearly 25 years of service & have now retired. It was a pleasure to serve our citizens, to have a voice, and to stand behind the promises of leadership that formed the city’s growth. It was a different time. Aurora was an amazing community, but it has since become shameless & disappointing. I regularly watch leaders that represent Aurora with immaturity, disrespect & disgracefulness for each other & their constituents. It is a joke to watch city council meetings. Your vote matters and it is very important. Make the change.
The numbers say it all but again the conservative members refuse to do anything. Add funding for more city inspectors to address the problem we have? nope. Institute a program that has been successful in other large cities that will pay for itself AND pay for additional (needed) inspectors? Nope. What is their solution? Go on Fox News and fear monger and use the issue to advance their own agenda to try to serve their interests while throwing the community under the bus. Yep sounds about right.
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Lets see, the blame has been aimed at; the property owners for being slumlords and allowing trash to accumulate; the City of Aurora for not funding inspectors and not enforcing code violations; the republicans for wanting to minimize government forces and expense. All those buildings were, at one time, new and clean with the potential to become thriving and successful business. What are the responsibilities of the tenants? Keep their apartments clean? Refrain from damaging the apartment building inside and out? Timely and orderly collecting their own trash and garbage and placing it in the dumpster? Paying the agreed amount of rent ON TIME? Not putting diapers, paper towels, and who knows what else down the toilet resulting in plugged drains and sewage backups? Are the relatively new Tenants Rights laws the reason landlords cannot enforce rent collection and timely eviction? When rents are not paid, it is increasingly difficult to pay for repairs, plumbers and trash collection. When tenants are destructive, neglectful, and choose to live in filth, conditions will become progressively worse. Rats, mice and disease thrive in those conditions. I would wager that many of those apartments are occupied by 2 or 3 times as many as are supposed to live there. There are probably many that spend their days on their free government paid phones instead of cleaning the apartment and taking out the trash and working to pay the rent. How many spend their welfare checks on drugs and alcohol instead of food, rent and cleaning supplies? I maintain that filth, squalor and disrepair primarily starts with the tenants and the landlords whose hands are tied when they want to correct the situation.