When Yorkiss Ramos and her family first arrived in Denver two years ago, she heard about an apartment complex that offered cheap rent and required little documentation to lease.
The 35-year-old Venezuelan immigrant and her family moved to a building on Aurora’s Nome Street in 2023. When she wasn’t cleaning houses and offices, she felt confined to the dilapidated apartment, with its rats and bed bugs. She was fearful of the rumored gang activity outside and the growing national backlash toward recent immigrants like her. The property’s owners, CBZ Management, ignored requests for help, she said.
The apartments “were already old, and they rented them in such poor condition,” Ramos said in Spanish in a recent interview. “… People looked for those options because they were the most affordable. We had barely arrived in the country — we didn’t have jobs, we didn’t know the laws, we didn’t know how to move around. Nothing.”
In August 2024, the city of Aurora ordered Ramos and the other occupants of the 98 units at 1568 Nome St. to leave because of the property’s deteriorating conditions. The city blamed CBZ’s chronic mismanagement. The New York-based company blamed a Venezuelan prison gang and local inaction.
Within weeks, CBZ’s three properties in Aurora — and the people living within them — were catapulted into a presidential campaign focused, to a great extent, on immigration. Then-former (and now current) President Donald Trump visited Aurora. Flanked by mugshots of alleged gang members, he promised to launch a deportation campaign named after the city and to invoke an 18th-century law to round up gang members.
A national focus on foreign gangs exploded forth: Google Trend data shows that searches for “Tren de Aragua,” the transnational Venezuelan gang, began to climb as city officials moved to board up Nome Street.
A year later, tenants like Ramos, City Council members, local leaders and a growing legion of lawyers are still dealing with the fallout.
Dozens of tenants from CBZ’s other troubled properties have moved elsewhere and tried to lay low. Some have been detained and even deported. A lawsuit against CBZ filed by Nome Street tenants is still winding its way through court.
Efforts by the company and city officials to blame each other for inaction have now moved from news channels to courtrooms. In one recent filing, the city acknowledged, despite past denials, that Tren de Aragua did take over one of CBZ’s properties last summer.
Policymakers — in Aurora, Denver and at the state Capitol — have changed laws, ordinances and practices to more tightly regulate bad landlords. State investigators have launched a probe into the squalid conditions at CBZ’s properties.
And in Aurora, city leaders have tried to shake off a reputation that gained them international notoriety.
“People genuinely believed we were taken over — gangs roving the street, taking people hostage. That was really the picture that people throughout the country had of what was happening in Aurora,” Councilmember Alison Coombs said. “I don’t think that image has completely gone away for some folks.”
Newly displaced tenants felt that stigma even more acutely. Jennifer Piper, the Denver program director for the American Friends Service Committee, said she organized older, white volunteers to accompany immigrant tenants when they met with new landlords.
Their goal: to show that they weren’t all gang members.
“People there started to cry out of despair,” Ramos said of Nome Street tenants after the property was closed. “The children would have nowhere to sleep. … Even though it was a bad place, it was someone’s place. It could provide safety, a place to sleep, rest.”
Nome Street remains dilapidated and closed. CBZ’s other two Aurora properties are also shuttered. In February, immigration authorities raided those buildings, including the Edge of Lowry, which had been made infamous late last summer by a viral video showing armed men in an apartment hallway.
Roughly a dozen people detained by immigration authorities in Colorado — including at least one who lived in a CBZ building and was not a gang member — were sent for holding to a notorious prison in El Salvador this year, according to ProPublica. Seven of them were removed under the 18th-century law Trump had promised to invoke from the stage of the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center during his October rally.
A collision of forces
A broken immigration system, the housing crisis, a contentious presidential election, gang activity and two major cities’ handling of absent landlords — all collided at CBZ’s three Aurora properties last year. And it happened in a politically purple city where one in five residents are immigrants.
Determining the legacy of that collision may depend on where you assign blame.
Aurora Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky, who publicly championed CBZ’s allegations of gang takeovers, said she felt vindicated. The police department, which she had previously criticized, has now stabilized, she said, with a permanent police chief.
“So much has happened for the good in the past year, and obviously, these buildings are shut down — they can’t be reopened until they’re brought up to code,” Jurinsky said. “Then, with immigration, we’ve watched these (Tren de Aragua) gang members be arrested all over the country, which I’m very thankful for.
“They hurt a lot of people, they tortured people, they kidnapped people, they extorted people. And I think Aurora is in a much better and a much safer place today than we were in a year ago.”
According to court filings, CBZ — which is controlled by Shmaryahu Baumgarten of New York, with his brother, Zev Baumgarten, as a Colorado-based representative — is considering selling at least some of its Aurora buildings.
Stan Garnett, an attorney representing CBZ in court actions with Aurora, said the legacy of the company and the city was still being written.
Legal fights between the city and CBZ have shed some new light. One of CBZ’s attorneys told Aurora officials late last year that a former property manager had been extorting tenants for rent, was “facilitating the presence of lethal weapons” at CBZ properties and may be a member of Tren de Aragua. Tashaira Williams, a tenant who lived at Nome Street, told The Denver Post last year that an armed CBZ employee had tried to evict her without cause.
Aurora police are still investigating, but the former property manager has not been arrested, city spokesman Joe Rubino said.
In late June, the city signed a joint agreement with CBZ’s lawyers acknowledging that the Edge complex had been taken over by the gang a year earlier — contradicting what city officials told The Post and other media last year.
The filing is part of the city’s ongoing legal fight with CBZ about the forced closure of the Edge of Lowry building, and it includes acknowledgement that gang members extorted residents for rent.
In a statement Thursday, another Aurora spokesman, Ryan Luby, said that the “city’s overall position on the devolution of the CBZ properties remains unchanged. CBZ’s principals neglected their own properties so grossly over the last several years that a multitude of bad outcomes resulted.”
As for the agreement acknowledging the gang’s presence at Edge, Luby said that the “overarching fact remains — that CBZ and its principals chose to neglect their properties for years and allowed criminal elements to flourish.”
Aurora pursues court case
As part of the city’s criminal nuisance action, it’s seeking roughly $845,000 — and counting — from CBZ for securing the property and relocating tenants. It accuses the company of abandoning the building and its residents.
“The city had to clear the property, relocate the residents, and secure the property since February — six months ago. Five Dallas Partners could have stepped up at any time since then, fixed the properties and placed them back into productive use,” Luby wrote, referring to a CBZ offshoot that formally owns the property.
“Instead of taking responsibility for the multitude of issues as required by law,” he wrote, “they elected to wage a legal and public relations campaign against everyone but themselves for the problems that arose.”
Armed with the city’s belated acknowledgement of a more extensive gang presence, CBZ argues that city police refused to respond to calls and left the property owners to fend for themselves against armed gang members.
The case is headed for a November jury trial. In the meantime, records show that Zev Baumgarten still has active arrest warrants in Aurora as well as Denver for missing court hearings.
Garnett, the attorney for CBZ and a former Boulder district attorney, said the company maintains that it intended to fix the properties it purchased just before the pandemic started. But those plans were derailed, he said, first by COVID-19 and then by gang members.
“The problems here are much more complex than the way the city has wanted to portray them,” he said, “and they’ve been really outside the ability of a private landlord to manage — like the invasion of these buildings and their takeover by TdA.”
But tenant complaints, lawsuits and municipal inspections also predate the gang allegations.
Complaints about CBZ properties began to be lodged shortly after the company bought a series of complexes in Denver, Aurora and elsewhere in Colorado. Tenants have described rat and pest infestations, missing hot water and heat, sagging infrastructure, unsecured doors and absent management. Their experiences span CBZ’s ownership and properties in the metro.
For most of that time, city officials in Aurora focused on collaboration and offered plea deals. Denver resisted closing buildings for fear of losing housing stock. But the complaints eventually drew the attention of the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, which opened an investigation into CBZ nearly two years ago.
After a judge ordered CBZ to comply with subpoenas from the AG’s office last month, the company asked an appellate court to intervene.
Coombs, the Aurora councilwoman, said part of the CBZ legacy is her city’s efforts to more tightly regulate bad landlords.
In late 2023, after advocates complained about the Nome Street property’s condition, the city council rejected a proposal to require that landlords have a license. But in June, with CBZ firmly in mind and the building now shuttered, the council passed a new ordinance allowing the city to take over chronically run-down buildings.
What happened with Nome Street and CBZ’s other buildings “created the political will that previously did not exist” to pass that ordinance, Coombs said.
In the spring, state legislators from Denver and Aurora spearheaded a new state law allowing local governments and the attorney general to temporarily take over dilapidated apartments.
In Denver, where one CBZ property accumulated massive fines and was closed earlier this year, health officials are “exploring options for earlier intervention and stronger enforcement tools to prevent properties from deteriorating to uninhabitable conditions,” city spokeswoman Amber Campbell said in a statement. Officials are also reviewing the city’s housing code and are expected to make changes next year, she said.
“The lessons learned from 1644 Pennsylvania, along with input from tenant organizations, will help shape changes that better reflect the needs of Denver residents,” she wrote, referring to CBZ’s now-closed Denver building in Uptown.
Making ends meet
For displaced tenants who were caught between an absent landlord, collapsing homes and gang members, moving on has been difficult. Some, like Ramos, have found new homes elsewhere, and they’re trying to build the lives they’d come to the United States to find.
But others are still experiencing housing instability, exacerbated by having to find a new place to live so quickly.
Many of the displaced children remain afraid of winding up on the streets, said Emily Goodman, the housing assistance campaign manager for the East Colfax Community Collective, a neighborhood advocacy group.
“A lot of people are still dealing with a lot of trauma from it all, just because of how it all went down,” she said. “Especially now, with the current climate of things, they feel even more targeted. They feel more unsafe, and they feel like nothing is stable or secure for them. Their kids are always worried and stressed.”
Javier Hernandez left most of his belongings behind when Aurora officials ordered the Nome Street apartments’ closure. He hopped from hotel to hotel until he could find something permanent.
The instability caused him to lose his maintenance job, he said. Now, the 28-year-old Venezuelan immigrant makes and sells food to try to get by. But business isn’t going well in a political climate hostile toward new arrivals.
A member of the LGBTQ+ community, Hernandez was fleeing discrimination back home when he arrived in Denver in December 2023. The trauma from being caught up in the CBZ narrative still lingers, he said. He can’t shake that the president of the country he’d fled to called him and his neighbors criminals.
All he wanted, he said, was to send money, medicine and clothing back to his family.
“Not all of us are delinquents, not all of us are criminals,” Hernandez said in Spanish in an interview. “We are all human, and we must listen to each other’s stories to understand why we are in this country.”
Staff writer Jessica Alvarado Gamez contributed to this story.
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