Aurora, like the metro area, has seen makeover miracles before.
A community non-profit group is working to take on re-creating an Aurora problem so fearsome it drew gasps from across the nation and even the globe.
The East Colfax Community Collective has purchased the notorious Edge of Lowry apartment complex to rehabilitate the 60 units across six buildings to create comfortable places to live for people who often struggle to afford comfortable places to live.
If you don’t know the name of the complex right off, you know the sordid story behind the northwest Aurora apartment complex, currently shuttered because it’s uninhabitable.
The Edge is one of three apartment complexes in the area, all owned by the same New York landlord, that regularly was the focus of Fox News in 2024 as Donald Trump cranked up his bid for another shot at the White House.
The apartments were woven into a hysterical false narrative powered by former Aurora City Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky, beginning in the summer of 2024. Jurinsky told local right-wing radio talk shows, and then Fox News personalities, that Aurora was being overrun by notorious Venezuelan gangsters in the Tren de Aragua mob.
It was the same yarn CBZ Management officials told in trying to justify why their three apartment complexes were rife with problems, ranging from rodent infestations, to mountains of garbage and rampant hoodlum antics and crimes.
The anti-immigrant narrative was tied to an influx months earlier of as many as 40,000 Venezuelan immigrants trafficked to Denver by Texas state officials in one of the darkest episodes in American history since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
As the story told by Jurinsky, and later Trump himself, went, Tren De Aragua members infiltrated the Edge apartments, destroyed them, and took over the complex, extorting the few honest residents in the building and locking out building owner management.
When police and city officials said the facts didn’t support the fabulous saga, Jurinsky and others said they were lying.
In reality, there’s plenty of proof that the city had been investigating issues linked to serious mismanagement of the complex even before the first Venezuelan immigrant got off the first bus from Texas in Denver.
Well-documented investigations by the city made clear that despite Mayor Mike Coffman’s preliminary allegiance to the false narrative, he eventually surmised that the problems related to the complex were caused by what he deemed as “slumlords.”
The city eventually began court action against CBZ, but not before Trump made Aurora one of two national targets of his campaign to drive immigrants from the nation. He insisted that not just these three apartments, but the entire city of Aurora had become a haven for violent immigrant gangsters. An Ohio city where Trump lied about Haitian immigrants eating people’s dogs and cats matched the madness spun around Aurora.
Eventually, the city forced the complex to shut down.
The East Colfax Collective has announced it purchased the Edge complex for $4.45 million.
“It’s a really powerful opportunity to reclaim and revive a property that has long been a toxic asset in the community and a source of harm in the community and turn it into something positive, into community-controlled affordable housing,” Carson Bryant, a director for the East Colfax Community Collective, said. “The redemption arc opportunity here is really strong and is exactly the kind of project we’re interested in pursuing.”
The justice of how this story will end, and there’s no reason to doubt how it will, is virtually poetic.
This embattled apartment complex has dragged the neighborhood, and the city, down. The lies told by local lawmakers and Trump have done serious and long-lasting damage to the northwest Aurora community, and the city as well.
A rebirth of The Edge, coupled with a new city-sponsored effort to restore the East Colfax Avenue corridor neighborhoods, have a real chance to do here what Dana Crawford did for the decayed Larimer Street in Denver in the 1960s and 1970s, turning a strip of flop-houses, abandoned buildings and grunge into a place where all kinds of people liked to come to eat, shop, live and hang out.
City lawmakers should step up to do all they can to help this non-profit organization create a safe, comfortable and affordable place for residents who often work harder and longer than any of us and rarely get an opportunity to get their just reward.
So, there’s a new non-profit in town. They’re telling us the great work they are planning with the shuttered apartments shut down by the city. The city’s muddled contribution to the apartment debacle coupled with CBZ ownership became a full-blown national exposé. It revealed how both were sucked into the political whirlpool and the fallout of Sanctuary City policy. A real hot potato for the squishy professional-politician. This local story made it to a congressional oversight meeting. It is fascinating to watch these four mayors squirm and give it all they can to avoid shouldering up to their own accountability. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPaUfXYk8N8&t=986s
Anyone in the city that watched this situation unfold and know how things went down. Then followed with the Sentinels same-ole reusable statement of deflecting border responsibility. Always bending away facts from any Biden/ Harris—policy of a full blown come on over across the border. No questions asked and No worries. Denver was overrun as the sanctuary city which Texas Governor gladly bused them up in a regular caravan fashion. Those charted buses one way north was pure political genius on Gov. Abbott’s part. He peacefully relocated the problem right where Denver had welcomed them to come to.
As a result, Aurora, Lakewood, and Adams County were just simple collateral damage, as the non-profits contracted with CBZ to fill vacancies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5wOxx1sAYM
Danielle Jurinsky, through emails with, Jessica Prosser, the director of Housing and Community Development for Aurora, learned that two Denver non- profits, ViVe Wellness, and Papagayo Organization were secretly moving migrants into Aurora. Danielle Jurinsky, knew instinctively and with APD’s gaining info what kind of a problem was likely imminent.
The three apartment complexes run by CBZ management were chosen to house the illegal immigrants because the property managers failed to do basic due diligence on their tenants. To TdA gangsters fresh from Venezuela it was a city akin to Disneyland and provided new fertile opportunity. All these non- important records seem fuzzy and foreign to the Sentinel. But one thing, they are at least consistent with their convenient omissions.
“Well-documented investigations by the city made clear” … Really? The city never completed their 2024 council assignment. The city’s expensive R-2024-129 Resolution, the council passed but has never been published. No doubt, Aurora was impacted by non-profits funded by Denver to moving people somewhere, somehow, just anywhere. How much real financial damage did Aurora suffer from these problems, chaos police, hotels? Well don’t bother asking anyone in Aurora city Gov. they’re clueless.
And although Aurora otherwise demonstrated they lacked much know-how to tackle or even find CBZ management to successfully get them into court does not mean everyone operates like Aurora. But unlike Aurora, and for some odd reason, US Bank Trust Company takes their losses serious. They also seem to hold the moxie to be able to find and serve their civil complaint upon CBZ management (Zev Baumgarten). Something Aurora never could figure out. Despite Auroras and its impressive fizzle, in three months an Arapahoe County District court judge will handle #2025CV31114, as a five-day trial has been set. US Bank did not wither. This trial should fill in a lot of unanswered questions of the players (NGO’s) and politicians involved in the meltdown. And for any squishy politician to appear, this time will be under oath.
RE: “the fallout of Sanctuary City policy.” Correction: you really need to acknowledge this– Aurora is NOT a Sanctuary City. It never has been. This is easily researched. You’re thinking of Denver. We have different mayors, different city councils, and different problems. Denver actually shipped illegal immigrants to our city, and dumped them off, which was not fair to the city, nor to the people who thought they were getting a new chance. They ought to just raze these blighted buildings in ‘warzone Aurora’, not unlike what they did to Potter’s House megachurch after its massive scandal (location- on Florida between Dayton and Parker. It disappeared into the ground like Carrie.) As for Danielle Jurinsky, she was an opportunist — a lackey wannabe, standing next to our Dictator overlord she brought here for her 15 minutes of fame. (If she thought he’d ever give her more than that, she didn’t know him very well.) And either Coffman was gullible or naive to go along with her, until he had to publicly get on the horn himself and say the whole thing was so outrageously overblown out of proportion. Aurora Voters saw right through, but it was too late. By then, the black eye, and the damage was done. But at least she isn’t on Aurora’s city council anymore, and no one believes Coffman, either.