A Denver judge ordered the closure of a neglected apartment building in the Uptown neighborhood Thursday night, sending tenants to a hotel and temporarily shuttering a long-troubled property that lacked heat, hot water and working fire alarms.
The William Penn apartments at 1644 Pennsylvania St. are controlled by CBZ Management, the owner of several infamous and rundown complexes in Denver and Aurora. Denver officials filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking the closure of the property, which has accrued nearly $280,000 in fines because of its unsafe condition, and the city asked a judge to place the building in the control of a third-party caretaker.
“In general, we’ve seen complete neglect from the landlord in any type of maintenance conditions here,” said Emily Williams, spokeswoman for the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment. The lack of heat and hot water, plus frequent break-ins, prompted the closure, she said.
The city’s previous attempts to bring the property up to code, she said, have “resulted in nothing.”
After the judge granted Denver’s request Thursday night, the city moved roughly 20 tenants out of the property and into hotels. A nonprofit is helping tenants move and store their belongings, Denver spokesman Jon Ewing said, and the city will help the displaced residents find new housing.
The city hasn’t pursued a similar closure and takeover process in at least 15 years, Ewing said. Denver officials also summarily suspended the property’s landlord license, which has never happened before.
“The (tenants) we’re talking about are folks who are going into 9-to-5 jobs, so the issue isn’t an income issue or anything along those lines,” Ewing said. “The issue isn’t anything (tenants) have done. The issue is entirely on the property owner.”
Bud Slatkin, an attorney for CBZ Management and its subsidiary company that formally owns the William Penn building, did not return an email seeking comment. CBZ Management is controlled by New York-based Shmaryahu Baumgarten and Colorado-based Zev Baumgarten.
While CBZ has claimed its failing Aurora properties were overtaken by gangs, it has made no such claims to explain the similarly dilapidated condition of its Denver complexes. The William Penn building has long struggled under the weight of absent management and failing infrastructure. Former tenants previously told The Denver Post that they had no heat and that security was completely absent.
Complaints filed to the city’s Department of Public Health and Environment detail years of neglect by CBZ. One long-running code violation case, which began in November 2023, included blood- and feces-like substances smeared on interior walls.
Those stains went uncleaned for weeks, even after the city flagged them for property managers.
Ewing said that the inside temperature of the property was 49 degrees recently and that the gas lines had been shut off. People had broken into the building and into units that the city had previously ordered closed, Ewing said, and they’d opened gas lines to warm themselves.
People who didn’t live in the building have long broken into the property, former tenants said. When city inspectors toured the apartments in August, they found a person sleeping in the laundry room. One former tenant told The Post that CBZ closed and sealed the garage because non-residents kept breaking into it and the property owners never properly secured it.
The building will now be repaired by a third-party caretaker. Once that’s complete and the property is brought up to code, ownership and control will be transferred back to CBZ.
Denver had sought to avoid closing William Penn or CBZ’s other troubled properties, officials previously told The Post, because they didn’t want to lose housing stock. Ewing said they felt they had no choice to shutter the building now.
“The situation we’re running into now, where there’s natural gas concerns, heat concerns — we’ve been in freezing temperatures now for a full month,” he said. “The elements may have necessitated an intervention.”
In the span of five months, CBZ Management has lost control of most of its properties in Aurora and Denver. Two Aurora properties — including the infamous Edge of Lowry — have been ordered closed because of their conditions and, in the case of the Edge of Lowry, because of the crime that proliferated there. Control of another Aurora property has been seized by a third-party caretaker because the Baumgartens failed to pay their debts.
Its serial code violations, as well as allegations that it misled tenants and engaged in insurance fraud, have sparked a first-of-its-kind investigation by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office into CBZ’s practices and its owners. Officials in both Aurora and Denver have also filed criminal actions against CBZ’s companies and its owners.
The company still controls two other properties in Denver, both of which also have long histories of unsafe conditions, as well as buildings in Pueblo, Edgewater and Colorado Springs. It also owns several properties in New York, though it scrubbed them from its website late last year. The company has since deleted its website entirely.
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