Before Aurora gang claims, CBZ Management’s bad inspections, tenant complaints

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 hazards and enabled nonresidents to enter, use drugs and sleep on the premises.

“I was really scared,” said Sarah Fahim, who lived in CBZ’s 1644 Pennsylvania St. building in Denver for two years, starting in March 2021. She had moved from California and wasn’t used to the cold. One winter, her apartment didn’t have heat.

“The few crazy weekends in Denver, where it’s like zero degrees, my windows would freeze over, even with the window sealed. I couldn’t see outside. It was freezing in my apartment. I had to wear three sweatshirts (and) leggings under sweatpants.”

Company blames “government failures”

CBZ has sought to blame recent problems at their Aurora properties on gang violence — including at an apartment building at 1568 Nome St. that the city ordered closed in early August because of persistent code violations. Tenants previously told The Post that gangs did have a presence in their buildings.

Law firms representing CBZ and a bank that holds a loan secured by CBZ’s properties told city officials this summer that a transnational Venezuelan gang had recently taken over the buildings, threatened employees and were collecting rent.

Last week, after Trump made his comments, a joint statement from Aurora officials said activity from that gang was limited and noted that police had arrested eight of the 10 suspected members of the gang, called Tren de Aragua, who’d been identified so far. While disputing that the city of 400,000 had been overrun, they wrote that gangs had “significantly affected” some properties.

Records and interviews show that CBZ’s Denver and Aurora properties were plagued by poor conditions and inattentive ownership well before gang reports surfaced.

Residents have raised concerns about the properties’ “slumlord” owners since at least early 2023, wrote Aurora City Councilwoman Alison Coombs in a post last week on the social platform X. In November, advocates showed images from CBZ’s Nome Street property, the one later condemned, to the City Council and urged its members to create a landlord licensure system — a proposal that did not advance past its first study session, advocates said.

Denver and Aurora inspectors have levied dozens of violations against CBZ’s properties in just the last two years. Many of them were repeat complaints after problems weren’t fixed.

Fahim’s old building in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood has nearly $40,000 in unpaid fines, prompting the city to place a lien against it. Several tenants have sued CBZ or the constituent companies that formally own its Colorado properties, alleging uninhabitable conditions and illegal evictions.

Zev Baumgarten, described in inspection reports and court records as CBZ’s owner, also faced at least two Aurora municipal court summonses in 2022 and 2023 over code violations.