For the past few weeks, right-wing media and politicians have been whipped up into a frenzy over the supposed takeover of an Aurora, Colorado apartment building by a Venezuelan gang after a video went viral depicting armed men in The Edge at Lowry complex. Despite the fact that numerous Aurora city officials, including the Aurora City Police chief and the city’s mayor have said that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has not taken over two troubled apartment complexes in the city, the right-wing media machine continues to spin this narrative and capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment. “Landlord forced to sell Colorado apartment complex after it was taken over by Venezuelan migrant gang Tren de Aragua,” reads a New York Post headline from September 8. Right-wing politicians have added fuel to the fire, including Republican nominee Donald Trump, who claimed last week, without evidence, that “rough” Venezuelan migrants had taken over “large sections of an area of Colorado.”
“Aurora, has anyone been there? I think you’d better stay away for a while,” he added.
Residents of the apartment complexes in question, however, claim that the landlord, the Brooklyn, New York based CBZ Management, has exploited anti-migrant frenzy as an excuse to neglect repairs in the building. The mayor of Aurora, a conservative himself, has dubbed CBZ Management as “out of state slumlords.”
The Edge resident Moises Didenot at a resident-organized press conference held on Tuesday, September 3,
They’re trying to say that here there are delinquents, that here there are criminals. Here there are moms, there are families, there are fathers. To me… the only criminal here is the owner of the building.
Most recently, city officials have agreed to drop all charges against the landlord of the apartment complexes, Zev Baumgarten, if he agrees to sell or lease the property at 1568 Nome St. in Aurora, another property that the landlord claims was overrun by gangs. The deplorable conditions at Nome St. resulted in the city condemning the property, resulting in the eviction of hundreds of tenants.
Yet, the anti-immigrant misinformation only continues to spread throughout the country. Audio from a TikTok account, which claims to be from a police scanner website, claims that Venezuelan migrants had taken over an apartment complex in Chicago. A video posted on Instagram went viral, claiming that “Illegal aliens tried to hijack 2 buses full of kids in San Diego.” The claims in both videos were unsubstantiated.
For more clarity on the situation in Aurora, Peoples Dispatch spoke to Nate Kassa, a community organizer with the East Colfax Community Collective, a grassroots organization in Colorado.
Peoples Dispatch: Can you talk about the work that your organization does with tenants in Aurora?
Nate Kassa: My organization that I work with supports renters and is fighting to improve housing conditions in the East Colfax neighborhood of Denver, which is a neighborhood that has a lot of low income residents, refugees, people of color. And through our work, we have met residents, through several years of working with them at the building that was shut down last month, 1568 Nome Street, that was shut down by the city of Aurora and is owned by CBZ Management [a company registered to Baumgarten].
And we’ve also met many residents who live at 1258 Dallas St, which is the subject of that viral video that came out recently. We work with them to help them improve their living conditions during negotiations with their landlord, to filing complaints with the city of Aurora when their landlord is not conducting maintenance. So we’ve seen firsthand how these [substandard living] conditions didn’t start this year, they’ve been going on for more than four years.
PD: Can you address some of the claims that the landlord has made about Venezuelan gangs taking over apartments?
NK: So the landlord has alleged that they’re not able to do maintenance at three of their buildings so far, 1568 Nome Street, The Edge at Lowry, and then Whispering Pines Apartments.
And through the residents I’ve spoken to, and through the residents speaking at a press conference, they shared that the building is not overtaken by Venezuelan gangs. They completely denounce that narrative.
The management company has also said that residents have been pressured to pay their rent to a third party, which they’re claiming is the Venezuelan gang. But residents are very clearly fighting against that narrative and saying, we have been paying our rent, we have money orders showing the receipts that they paid. They have their portal that was deactivated by the landlord, but that shows the history that they’ve been paying their rent to the landlord.
The landlord is saying they’re not able to provide maintenance because they’re scared by a Venezuelan gang. But it’s very, very evident that the landlord hasn’t been providing maintenance for years.
The city of Aurora has released, through their Aurora Code Enforcement Department, which is responsible for maintaining and ensuring that landlords’ properties are up to code, records publicly that show since 2021 and on, that the landlord, CBZ Management, at multiple properties, has failed to remedy conditions. There’s been rats, broken appliances, mold, at several of these units. CBZ Management has a long history of this, and the city has publicly released those records.
PD: Can you talk more about this landlord?
NK: CBZ Management, they just went through a class action lawsuit against them from the tenants at 1568 Nome Street. And the lawsuit found that the landlord has to pay for relocation, to another hotel unit or comparable apartment unit for those residents, because his units were not in livable condition. They were not up to code. The court just validated these allegations and claims. The landlord is now paying for the relocation of dozens of tenants for up to 60 days, which is required under the law, while he is required to fix the conditions in the units.
CBZ management also has a pattern and practice of flipping properties. It’s not just in Aurora. There’s a case in Colorado Springs where the CBZ gave residents at a building, where most residents were seniors, 60 days to leave in the winter, and they ended up taking all those residents out and then flipping the property to become a high end luxury property.
Even the mayor of Aurora has called them “out of state slumlords.”
PD: Can you speak to the right-wing fear mongering around migrations from Venezuela that exists in the U.S., and how the landlord might be exploiting that?
NK: While so many people know how blatant the crimes of CBZ management are, it’s coming at a time where anti-immigrant sentiments in the light of the U.S. presidential elections are strong. It’s being used in tandem with this narrative to distract from CBZ management’s responsibility to their tenants.
We’ve seen members of the Aurora City Council, specifically Danielle Jurinsky, who went on Fox News, to say that the building has been taken over by a Venezuelan gang, despite the fact that the city itself has records of the landlords’ negligence at multiple properties for multiple years now.
This rhetoric also affects these residents, many of whom have migrated from Venezuela, as responsible for the conditions there and also just completely leaving the landlord out of the picture who is the main person responsible for the conditions at the building.
The residents spoke up directly at their press conference, and they said very clearly that our main concern is the landlord. Our main concern is the living conditions of our families. And the landlord is a criminal. The landlord is a criminal, and he’s putting our children and our families in deplorable conditions.
PD: Can you speak to some of the root causes of what is driving people to migrate from Venezuela to the U.S.?
NK: Many people I’ve spoken to, they miss their families. They want to be back with their families. It’s a very dangerous and arduous journey to make it from Venezuela to the United States. It’s not a decision that they made lightly. Were the conditions in Venezuela more favorable, and if there were conditions where the economy could thrive, many people wouldn’t have left.
I think it’s very clear that because of the U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, the Venezuelan economy is not able to thrive. I think that’s the main root cause that people are leaving Venezuela.