More than 85 families living in a condemned Aurora apartment building said goodbye to their homes under city order on Tuesday morning, but one of Fitzsimons Place’s former tenants has sued the property owners and managers.
The lawsuit, filed Monday by Javier Hidalgo, sought to force the landlords to provide him and other displaced residents with housing. The suit cites conditions that made the 98-unit building “fundamentally uninhabitable,” including water leaks, pest infestations and structural damages.
Hidalgo is asking Adams County District Court to order property owner Nome Partners LLC, property management company CBZ Management and its representatives, Shmaryahu and Zev Baumgarten, to provide former residents with either apartment units similar to their old ones or hotel stays for at least 60 days.
“Every one of us tenants in that building feel like we were defrauded,” Hidalgo said in Spanish on Tuesday afternoon. “We were robbed from the very beginning.”
Benjamin DeGolia, Hidalgo’s attorney, said he also plans to seek a significant amount of back rent for every tenant.
“Unfortunately, we see a lot of properties in the Denver metro area that have been neglected,” DeGolia said. “But I’ll also say that these conditions in this building are exceptionally horrific.”
The latest litigation follows legal action pursued by the city of Aurora against Zev Baumgarten for longstanding code violations at Fitzsimons Place. However, CBZ Management argued that recent problems on the property were caused by a transnational Venezuelan gang’s presence at the building.
Spokespeople representing the property management company declined to provide further comment.
On Tuesday morning, tenants of the building — many of whom are Venezuelan migrants — scrambled to finish moving out before police arrived just after 7 a.m., said Nate Kassa, a community organizer at the East Colfax Community Collective. Residents were given only six days to leave by the city.
“We were still rushing to get everybody out on all four floors,” Kassa said. “Right now, these people are literally homeless.”
Aurora city spokesperson Ryan Luby confirmed that it appeared the building, 1568 Nome St. near the Anschutz Medical Campus, was vacated by 9:30 a.m.
Around that time, the East Colfax Community Collective directed 70 former tenants to 25 hotel rooms as temporary shelter, with at least 30 more rooms available to those still being processed, Luby said.
Only “a handful” of residents had found other housing options, Kassa said. Since early hotel check-ins weren’t available Tuesday, he added, former tenants were waiting at the corner of Oswego Street and East 16th Avenue around 1 p.m.
“The parents — they’re just ready to be in the next place,” Kassa said. “We as a community need to push the city to make sure that they execute their promises.”
The city will cover the hotel stays through the end of August. When former tenants find a new place to live, organizations working with Aurora officials will pay for their new security deposits through a flex fund, Luby said.
Later, he said, the city plans to recover the money shelled out for the abatement, security deposits and hotel rooms from CBZ Management and its principals.
The affected renters protested the impending move-out deadline on Monday at the Aurora Municipal Building, pressing City Manager Jason Batchelor and Mayor Mike Coffman to grant them another two months to secure housing. They also requested city support for security deposits, housing vouchers and financial aid for the first month’s rent.
But city officials didn’t waver on the Tuesday morning deadline to vacate the apartment complex.
After shutting off utilities, “city contractors will subsequently begin boarding up the building and fencing off the entire property,” Luby said in a Monday statement.
“Let us be clear,” he wrote, “the blame for this unfortunate circumstance rests solely with CBZ Management and its principals, the owners and managers of the property, who have repeatedly failed their tenants for years by allowing the building and property to fall into a state of complete disrepair.”
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