Caveat venditor, slumlords!

 

I have lived in cities across the US, from Las Vegas to D.C and a few in between, and I have never had a bad experience with a property manager until I moved to Colorado. What I have been through brought out my activist side.

In 2019, I testified in support of a Safe and Healthy Homes bill to strip away the landlord's presumption of good intentions in Colorado landlord-tenant law to make us equal in the eyes of the law; the bill also added habitability standards. My testimony described a nightmare situation in 2008 followed by another slumlord situation a few years later and I am still testifying for renter's rights today. Weak consumer protection in Colorado is not new, and it's time to end the exploitation. I'm sharing my testimony from 2019 and hope you will share your stories.

“I want to tell you about my personal experiences with substandard housing and unscrupulous landlords. In 2008, I moved into an apartment in Colorado Springs that was affordable based on my income. In the middle of a cold winter night, I woke up so dizzy and sick that I could not stand. I crawled across the apartment to the front door, opened the door, and fell out across the threshold into the snow. When my head cleared up enough that I could stand again, I opened every window in the apartment and shut off the heater that was burning bright orange flames. The next day, the manager was reluctant to tell me what had happened but the guy that did the work told me he didn't know how I was still alive. He informed me that the gas unit had been red-tagged by the City as hazardous and should not have been used until it had been repaired and inspected. I was that close to being a casualty of carbon monoxide poisoning because my life was not worth the cost to repair a red-tagged gas heater. I was eventually able to move to a larger apartment complex but left when the lease was up because management increased rent by $200 per month which was not affordable.

That move led to my second experience with a slumlord. On moving into an apartment in Fountain, I noted a long list of needed maintenance and repairs including apparent mold in a bathroom wall and ceiling, loose tiles around the tub, a broken window that could not be closed or locked, a sliding patio door that did not have a lock, and other problems. A month went by, then another with nothing but excuses from the manager.

Early the day after Thanksgiving, as I ran the water in the bathroom sink to brush my teeth I noticed the drain was sluggish, then the toilet bowl started to gurgle and back up with brown-colored water. The same gurgling sound crept under the bathtub followed by a stench, then debris and brown water—technically, greywater. I heard people running in the hall trying to figure out how to shut off the water main as greywater filled the bathtubs, sinks, and toilets of every apartment on the first floor. Someone finally reached the property owner. He was not eager to leave his $500,000 home in Monument on a holiday weekend to deal with a maintenance issue at his slum property in Fountain. When he finally arrived, about six hours later, he said he would wait until Monday to call a plumber because the repair would already be expensive; calling a plumber on a holiday would cost even more. I took out my phone and started dialing the local news, other neighbors made threats that I won’t repeat. He relented, but it took the rest of the weekend to get some kind of repair completed and the water back on. Not once did the owner offer to provide water or some other place to stay; he left us to live in that muck for three days.

In either of these situations, if I had an equal legal right to enforce the terms of the lease contract then I would not have faced retaliation or been forced to move out. But that's what happened to me, both times. I didn't choose to live in these places for any reason other than it was affordable based on my income. Rent in the Springs has increased year over year and moving expenses every year or two adds a greater burden, especially given the shortage of affordable housing.

All this bill is about is fairness. This is a health and consumer protection issue. No one should have to live in unsafe or unsanitary conditions because they can’t afford to move elsewhere or to live in a more modern property. I urge the committee to pass this bill. Thank you for your time.”

Safe and Healthy Homes was signed into law. As for the slumlord who hid needed repairs to a gas heater and almost killed me, he died on a tour bus in California when they were hit by a mudslide. The slumlord who left us swimming in shit over Thanksgiving weekend not only sold off the Fountain property but also several Victorian homes in downtown Colorado Springs after the Colorado Springs mayor was informed of that slumlord’s dirty deeds in Fountain. #FAFO, I guess. Never give up, never give in.

What My Renting Experience Taught Me About Who Really Owns My City

 

I have been working on my Colorado Springs housing study for the past few months, in between mini-dramas next door and property management harassment. I have learned that much of my renting experience is explained by foreign entity ownership of rental housing: their use of apps to increase rent (not based on amenities or improvements to the property, just plain greed), hiding ownership behind LLCs, using ratio utility billing to hide other unrelated expenses, polluting the ground water with products related to illegal auto repair work, manipulating app features to generate fees & change lease dates/terms, and harass and bully anyone who challenges their extraction scheme. Actually, one-hundred percent of my experience is explained by foreign LLCs owning rental housing.

I framed my examination of Colorado Springs housing policy and developers’ websites through the lens of financialization/neoliberal economic theory to better understand decision-makers’ perception of housing needs. Next, I searched the same source documents for other participants in the decision-making and found the rest of us were not included. We were spoken about but not asked what we needed or what our vision was for our city and neighborhoods. Long story short: when I looked at household characteristics and housing type, I found renters were bearing the heaviest housing cost burden, meaning paying more than 30% of household income on housing alone. No other basic needs, just the roof over our heads. And yet, no one asked us. That is not a democratic process, it is a hierarchical paternalistic entity.

How can Colorado Springs justify to its residents that building more apartment complexes for foreign entity owners to use to extract as much profit for themselves and as little safety and security for us? I say it cannot. Yet Colorado is among the 10 states with the highest number of private equities draining our pockets, and not just in housing. Private equities run our health care, public pensions, and private sector workforce. I can’t share my study here yet, but here’s a report about private equities in Colorado: https://privateequityrisk.org/state/colorado/

If you open the link you can find your state in the drop-down and learn how equities are shaping affordability in your home. Does my experience sound familiar to your own? Please share your story.

Rental Housing in an Antisocial Environment

I’ve heard some of the local NIMBY group members complain at City Council public meetings about overcrowding, heavy traffic, and other typical growth issues when apartment complexes are planned for development pretty much anywhere in the city. But when one of the men complained about window air conditioners decreasing his property value, I was stumped. I had to think about that for a minute. What was he really complaining about? Maybe it wasn’t appearances but behavior. Why can’t we talk about behavior? It’s necessary to talk about behavior when tax dollars are funding so much as a nickel (because we don’t have pennies anymore) toward housing developments.

If this neoliberal economic hellscape we’re living in had a mantra it would be “I will do whatever I want!” That attitude is reflected in the poor living conditions of every Foreign LLC owned and managed rental apartment complex in the city, not just those built for section 8.

Constructing housing for a specific program need does not solve the problem of affordability when the attitude among those who “do whatever I want” destroys the property they live in and the neighborhood around it. And this attitude prevails at Foreign LLC owned and managed apartment complexes. The appearance of window air conditioners is not the worst thing you’re going to find at these apartment complexes. Antisocial behavior is the bigger concern, and it seems like city development plans lack robust situational awareness. Here’s what it looks like when neoliberal laissez faire economics kicks the shit out of civility and common sense; things I see on any given day:

>>kids run screaming around the parking lot and in between cars, throw rocks, vandalize personal property, kill landscaping plants, break branches off the trees, leave bikes and scooters and toys in the middle of the parking lot, cuss at and beat up other kids, speak disrespectfully at all the adults who live here, etc.

>>adult-age tenants disrupting quiet enjoyment by letting their dogs bark without correction

>>exposing neighbors to the toxic effects of smoking and drug use

>>violating quiet hours with loud conversations and stomping their feet, slamming doors and cabinets

>>throwing objects against shared interior walls, pounding on the walls

>>polluting the groundwater by operating illegal auto shops

>>parking in the fire lanes

And this is happening in what is called “market-rate” apartments. The problem is, the owner/management company is a foreign LLC.

A Foreign LLC is only interested in extracting profit from these properties so they promote antisocial behavior by not taking corrective action or in some cases, directly participating in it themselves. The combination of antisocial tenants and antisocial foreign LLCs adds up to uninhabitable living conditions and the curb appeal of a junk yard. 

Rather than fund large apartment complexes, spend our tax dollars on accountability measures: ban Foreign LLCs from owning and/or managing rental properties; establish a rental licensing program for accountability and retention of what remains of habitable rental housing; prioritize small starter homes for retirees wanting to downsize and use their equity for their personal needs, and for individuals who want to secure their financial future with home ownership. The purpose of housing is not to accumulate wealth for asset managers, but to secure our own personal wealth. Constructing apartment complexes does not contribute to individual financial security or stability and is not sustainable model for the development of a thriving city.