Cody Cross was excited to move out of the Edge at Lowry apartments last summer.
There were the rodents, the broken heat, the trash and the shootings. The city had been fighting the landlord, CBZ Management, for years. And that’s not to mention the national uproar about a Venezuelan gang on the premises.
But as it turned out, Cross would be heading to another CBZ building — this one in Denver on Jewell Avenue — with some of the same issues. Three months later, he said his living situation is still pretty rough.
“It’s a slightly better improvement. But there’s a lot of things I still think that need to be fixed,” he said. “It’s just [the landlord] not having enough money to actually be able to. Or if he does, he just doesn’t care.”
The heat in his new place is often broken. The exterior doors aren’t secure. Squatters have moved into vacant rooms and use drugs in common areas. And it’s part of a pattern that stretches across multiple cities.
Similar issues have unfolded at another CBZ property on Pennsylvania Street, which Denver officials shut down last week in a rare flex of the city’s growing power over property owners. (Aurora officials had already shut down the landlord’s Nome Street property, and they’re closing the rest of the Edge at Lowry on Dallas Street next month.)
Meanwhile, the company’s third property in Denver also has garnered complaints from residents, and an apartment it operates in Edgewater was the subject of a lawsuit over mold, sewage and an “extremely painful rash.”
CBZ declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing litigation. The company’s website has been offline for some time, but its owners still hold the titles to its properties across the metro. The company also has had a presence in Pueblo, Colorado Springs and Brooklyn, N.Y.
Read full article: denverite.com | by Kevin Beaty & Kyle Harris | Image by Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
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