In Denver, city officials issued a landlord license to CBZ’s three apartment complexes there in 2023 as it
As children in backpacks laughed and ran past their apartment, Sorali Leon and Manuel Ledezma readied their three daughters for school.
Like he does every day, Ledezma took the children from the family’s Whispering Pines apartment in Aurora and dropped them off on his way to a local junkyard, where he works as a mechanic. After they left, Leon cooked while, outside, laundry fluttered on the balcony above a patchy brown yard.
“Everybody here is very friendly,” Leon said in Spanish. She stirred a pot of sopa de mondongo, a vegetable soup, on her stovetop as the family’s white dog, Fluffy, watched.
The Venezuelan family has lived here for two months, she explained, squeezing in with a cousin and another friend. In that time, the complex — along with three others managed by the same company — has drawn national attention over allegations that it was overtaken by a transnational Venezuelan gang. In those months, the family has also dealt with the same problems, like pest infestations and piled-up trash outside, that other residents of CBZ Management’s Colorado properties have complained about for years.
Still, Leon said, it was better than when the family lived in their car. And they hoped to stay — even as they found themselves caught in the middle of the runaway story about gang takeover claims that fueled sensational headlines and influenced a presidential election that could determine the future for millions of immigrants like them.
Since August, CBZ’s representatives have engaged in a public campaign to blame its problems on recent gang activity, including asserting that it caused them to flee the properties. But interviews, documents and other reporting by The Denver Post reveal a more complicated collapse in which gangs were the latest in a long line of crises.
Since at least 2020, tenants in CBZ’s properties in Denver and Aurora have intermittently lived with broken heating systems, seeping sewage water, broken doors, cockroach infestations and black mold so severe that one housing advocate said his hand sank into it. Lawsuits, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and, now, a first-of-its-kind investigation by the Colorado attorney general have followed a company that officials in two cities have been unable to bring into compliance.
Gang members have followed, too.
They’ve threatened tenants, beat one of CBZ’s representatives and engaged in shootouts near the properties, amid a year of documented criminal activity.
This story draws on interviews with two dozen current and former tenants, lawyers, housing advocates, legislators and Aurora officials, as well as hundreds of pages of inspection reports, tenant complaints, internal emails, legal filings and other public records obtained by The Post. The material portrays a company that chronically refused to fix unsafe housing conditions across its seven properties in Denver and Aurora, while officials in those cities offered plea deals and licensure to the landlord, even as its practices continued unabated.
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The problems culminated in the presence of gang members on some of the properties, the …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Politics
