Jo Buckley pulled up to Aurora’s Edge of Lowry apartments in August 2020. Fresh out of graduate school in Fort Collins, she was driving a car packed with her belongings as she prepared to start a teaching job nearby.
She’d toured her new home virtually and had already signed the lease. The rental company, CBZ Management, told her to be there at 8 a.m. But it wasn’t until 7 p.m. that she was finally let in. She quickly realized the reason for the delay.
“There was a crew there actively rushing and working to try to get things moved in,” she said. Her walls were freshly painted. “Right behind me, they carried up the stove.”
The next day, when her dad tried to push that new stove flush against the wall, it short-circuited and sparked. When her mom went into the bathroom, water seeped from the floor under the pressure of her feet.
Buckley’s father thought the unit was uninhabitable, so she moved out — starting a months-long fight with the property owners and a third-party security deposit company to expunge an eviction from her record and clear a nearly $2,000 charge.
Four years later, the same property in Aurora is among several at the center of a national firestorm about an alleged takeover of apartment buildings by a Venezuelan gang. It was made infamous by camera footage of armed men in the Edge of Lowry’s hallways — which went viral and stoked an intense election-year focus on immigration. The national attention reached its zenith last week, when former President Donald Trump inaccurately referenced the situation on a prime-time debate stage, and then at a rally.
But problems at CBZ Management’s local properties — three in Denver and four in Aurora — long predated any gang involvement.
Former tenants at four CBZ locations in Denver and Aurora, together with court records and municipal inspection reports obtained by The Denver Post through public records requests, portray strikingly similar issues across the properties, dating back to 2020. The problems have included black mold, water leaks, a lack of hot water, broken appliances, sagging infrastructure, fees for amenities that didn’t work or didn’t exist, rodent and cockroach infestations, poor building security and slapdash repairs.
At the Edge of Lowry, 1218 Dallas St., Buckley had noticed that the building smelled like cigarette smoke and mildew, and locks on some of the units she passed had been knocked out.
After she decided to vacate, her battle over the eviction record and security deposit created so much stress, she said, that it contributed to her leaving teaching.
At multiple CBZ buildings, the records obtained by The Post show that tenants and city inspectors repeatedly pressed property managers to repair heat and infrastructure, clear debris and trash, and, in one case, to clean up blood stains that had been ignored for weeks. In Denver, CBZ’s problems were significant enough to land it on the “radar” of the city’s top health inspection official.
Former tenants who spoke to The Post said the deteriorating conditions created security …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Politics
