Inside the Denver tenant power movement

By Robert Davis

Abigail Espino started organizing a tenant union at the Edge26 apartment complex in Edgewater after the landlord Trion Properties—a multifamily real estate investment firm headquartered in Hollywood, California—increased her rent by more than 55% from $900 to $1,400 per month.

She said she had also heard from Hispanic families at the complex that white families were getting their maintenance issues first, sometimes a month or two ahead of Hispanic families that filed similar work tickets. Some Hispanic families even resorted to fixing their own dishwashers and showers because of it, Espino added. Some households, like Espino’s, lived without hot water for a week or more last winter, she said.

Those testimonies hit home for Espino, who told Denver VOICE that part of the issue was that Trion didn’t have someone in the front office who spoke Spanish.

“I couldn’t believe that some people were living like that and the apartment managers weren’t doing anything to fix it,” Espino said.

So, the Edge26 tenants started organizing a union with the help of Edgewater Collective, a local non-profit organization. They showed up to city council meetings and told the community about their living conditions. At first, Espino said a lot of people showed up, and that seemed to push Trion to hire an employee who spoke Spanish.

But then attendance at the tenant meetings started to dwindle. Espino said she suspected people stopped coming because the union couldn’t address the community’s main concern—rent increases.

“We are here to help, but there are some things that we just can’t address. And unfortunately, rent is one of them,” Espino said.

Espino’s situation at Edge26 is similar to the experiences that many tenants in Denver face as the city’s multifamily market continues to soar. Commercial real estate firm Marcus and Millchap’s Q2 2023 Denver Multifamily Market Report found that the city’s 90% rent payment fulfillment rate and high average yields continue to draw out-of-state investors to the market. Out-of-state investors accounted for nearly half of all transactions over the last 12 months and that investment activity is one reason why the city’s average rent has increased by more than 28% since March 2020 up to nearly $2,000 per month, according to the report.

Trion Properties is just one company that sees huge profit potential in the Denver metro area’s multifamily market. Since 2020, Trion has acquired properties such as The View at North Peak Apartments, a 288-unit community in Northglenn, for $38 million; the 402-unit Terra Village in Edgewater (which was later rebranded as Edge26) for $109million, and a 198-unit complex in Aurora called Trailpoint on Highline for about $28 million. Trion also offers its more than 1,200 investors an average internal return rate of 18% over the 18-plus years that the company has been operating, according to its website.

Denver VOICE reached out to Trion Properties for comment about the allegations made against the company but did not receive a reply before press time. Some tenants also say that the staggering rent increases some landlords are instituting are putting them at risk of losing their homes. Denver led the nation with a 71% gap between local median rents and household income between 2009 and 2021, according to a recent study by Witch, a subsidiary of the real estate platform Clever.

In turn, tenants across the Denver metro area have formed unions to try and slow rent increases and provide better living conditions for renters. Although many of the issues these unions are trying to address exist at the individual building level, some union organizers say the organizations are driven by the same issues. Namely, that local lawmakers seem eager to engage tenants about the issues they face but don’t show the same enthusiasm when it comes time to passing legislation that could stop the issues from happening in the first place.

“There seems to be a lack of awareness from the people in power, who are oftentimes not renters themselves,” Shannon Hoffman, a member of Denver’s Democratic Socialist party and former city council candidate, told Denver VOICE in an interview. “They’re not in close proximity to the people who are facing eviction or who are unable to pay rent, and that precludes them from being able to see the human side of the issue and making the link between a lack of affordable housing and the increasing rates of homelessness that we’re seeing.”

ROOTS THAT RUN DEEP

The roots of the frustrations some Denver renters feel predate the coronavirus pandemic, but the event seemingly served to exacerbate their concerns. Rents followed the demand for non-congregate shelter upwards at a startling pace. At the same time, low-wage workers like cooks, housekeepers, and cashiers were “disproportionately displaced” from the labor market at the onset of the pandemic, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

In turn, local governments across the metro area Instituted eviction moratoriums to prevent as many people as possible from losing their homes because of pandemic-induced job losses or work-hour reductions. They also used federal funds to dramatically expand rental assistance programs, and some counties like Denver created eviction legal defense programs for renters.

Over the past three years, lawmakers in the General Assembly have also passed a wide range of progressive style bills that prohibit source of income discrimination by landlords, housing discrimination based on someone’s hair type, and gave tenants more power to address issues in their rental contracts.

So why do some renters say these efforts haven’t been enough? Hoffman said one reason is that the programs that lawmakers have created are not large enough to meet the scale of need. For example, Denver has its own eviction defense program but there were still more than 1,200 evictions filed in May, which is 35% higher than the number recorded in May 2019 before the pandemic began, Denverite reported. However, Denver only spends about $1.5 million annually on its eviction program, a total that has remained stagnant over the last two years, according to city budget documents.

Hoffman added that lawmakers have also failed to pass legislation that directly addresses some of the tenant organizations’ concerns like requiring just cause in an eviction case. The bill sought to limit the instances where a landlord could legally evict a tenant but was ultimately laid over before the last legislative session ended.

Eighteen anti-poverty organizations including the ACLU of Colorado, Colorado Poverty Law Project, and the Colorado Village Collaborative penned a letter asking newly elected Denver Mayor Mike Johnston to implement many of the requirements of the just cause eviction bill such as ending evictions for unpaid rent and increasing funding for eviction legal defense programs. These organizations also called on Johnston to increase eviction defense funding by up to $10 million annually.

“There’s a real lack of trust, and we’re starting from less than- zero on many of these issues,” Melissa Meja, the state and local policy director for the Community Economic Defense Project, a nonprofit that also signed the letter to Johnston, told Denver VOICE in an interview.

Another issue that Hoffman said needs to be addressed is Colorado’s ban on rent control, which stems from the 2000 Colorado Supreme Court decision in Town of Telluride v. Lot Thirty-Four Venture, LLC, also known as the “Telluride decision.”

Lawmakers introduced a bill during the 2023 legislative session that sought to repeal local rent control prohibitions, but the bill was subsequently laid over after a strong lobbying effort from groups like the Associated Builders and Contractors of the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado Apartment Association, and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, according to the Colorado Secretary of State’s office.

TAKING MATTERS INTO THEIR OWN HANDS

While the disconnect between renters and lawmakers has some tenants taking matters into their own hands by organizing, it also has pitted some tenants against their landlords in the courtroom.

In early June, five tenants filed a class action lawsuit against Tschetter Sulzer, P.C., a law firm in Denver that specializes in eviction cases. Each plaintiff described situations where they were charged attorneys’ fees and costs by the law firm after it represented their landlords in eviction cases against the plaintiffs for nonpayment of rent.

Carol Kennedy, an attorney with the Colorado Poverty Law Project who is representing the plaintiffs, told Denver VOICE that Colorado law prohibits these fees from being assessed in cases that are settled out of court, as each of the class action plaintiffs did.

The lawsuit also represents an urgent question for lawmakers about how they will enforce new laws aimed at protecting renters as debates about tenant rights spill over into the next legislative session.

“This is just an effort to enforce the laws as they are currently written, and make the system work in the way that it is supposed to work,” Kennedy said.

Kinsey Hasstedt, the senior state and local policy program director at Enterprise Community Fund, told Denver VOICE that she sympathizes with the frustration of renters because the past few years have been “a decidedly mixed bag” in terms of policy.

Hasstedt said renters can take some solace in the fact that tenants’ rights and affordable housing issues will remain the top issue for state lawmakers for the foreseeable future. There is also a growing coalition of lawmakers under the Gold Dome that seem committed to prioritizing those issues, she said.

“It used to be that you couldn’t get anyone to talk about affordable housing but now no one can stop talking about it,” Hasstedt said. “People are running on it, and they’re telling their constituents about it. Affordable housing and renters’ rights issues aren’t going anywhere.”

Denver VOICEAugust 30, 2023