It was 2:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, and Reid Matsuda was looking for rat burrows.
Matsuda, a program supervisor for the city of Denver’s residential health and housing investigation team, was visiting the Mosiac Apartments, 6900 E. Evans Ave., on that recent afternoon for a follow-up inspection. The complex had made headlines in 2023 after repeated complaints about rats and other problems generated an all-hands-on-deck “proactive” inspection from city investigators.
Repeated visits eventually resulted in thousands of dollars in city fines against the property’s management.
“We really had to shake the tree and get them on board,” Matsuda said. “We even met with their pest management team to say, ‘What do you need?’ ”
City officials are eager to expand the practice of proactive inspections like those as part of an effort to step up oversight of landlords in Denver. In early 2025, the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment, or DDPHE, plans to add two new staffers to the residential health and housing team. The modest expansion is aimed at boosting the city’s ability to intervene at problem properties.
The team is tasked with enforcing Denver’s housing code, which sets standards for health and safety at residential properties. The code includes a mandate that owners and operators provide basics for tenants, like hot water, heat and pest control.
That team’s workload has increased in recent years, program leaders say. Since launching proactive property inspections in August 2021 — as a complement to the team’s usual complaint-driven work — the city has carried out 36 such inspections, as of mid-December. They are labor intensive, with inspectors endeavoring to knock on every door at a property if they can.
That gives tenants who might otherwise be intimidated, or who might not know where to bring their concerns, an opening to talk to city officials about the habitability of their apartments.
“Sometimes there is no issue, but other times people have had ongoing issues,” Matsuda said of the proactive door-knocking like that done by his team at the Mosiac early on. “A lot of people are hesitant (to log complaints) because they don’t want to be labeled problem tenants.”
In 2021, the City Council passed an ordinance requiring all residential landlords to obtain licenses to operate their properties. That program, overseen by the city’s Department of Excise and Licenses, requires landlords to pass an inspection performed by a private, third-party inspector. It’s independent of DDPHE’s program.
Renter advocates hope a strengthened home health inspection team will hold landlords to higher standards.
“There are bad actors out there”
The city’s ability to support renters struggling with unresponsive landlords has been the focus of amplified public scrutiny in the wake of high-profile cases like Mosiac and CBZ Management.
CBZ has faced court actions stemming from the derelict conditions of buildings it owns in both Denver and Aurora — the latter garnering international attention for activity involving a transnational Venezuelan gang. In Aurora, CBZ has attempted to place blame for the unsafe and unsanitary conditions of its buildings on alleged takeovers by gang members, but those conditions long predate the gang activity, city officials have said.
“The reality is that there are bad actors out there who are not putting in the work that’s necessary to maintain their properties on a regular basis,” said Nicol Caldwell, who oversees 11 public health inspection programs for Denver’s public health department, including the residential team. “We have made a concerted effort to dedicate a large portion of our time to taking care of it.”
In the months ahead, Caldwell is looking forward to bringing in some much-needed help.
Mayor Mike Johnston dedicated $400,000 in his 2025 budget to pay for the salaries, benefits and other costs of two new full-time positions on the residential health team for the next two years. One of those positions will be another investigator, bringing the total number on the team to 10. The other will be a data analyst, another need identified both by city officials and renter advocates who interact frequently with the department and raise awareness about problem properties.
The budget allocation was a compromise.
A supermajority of the Denver City Council’s members originally requested that the mayor provide $590,000 in 2025 to pay for four to six additional staff members for the team. The council majority’s stated goal was to increase the department’s inspector ratio, now one for every 9,000 rental units in the city, according to an Oct. 11 letter to the mayor’s office.
Even with a gain of fewer total positions, advocates and council members said they appreciated that Johnston worked with them on the issue, as well as his commitment to monitoring the team’s needs and outcomes in the future.
“This will support DDPHE’s goals of taking earlier enforcement action when violations of the housing code are documented, increasing engagement with tenants’ unions, and meeting ongoing needs for data analysis, public data sharing, and open records requests,” Johnston wrote in a response letter to council on Oct. 18.
Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez was involved in conversations with DDPHE and the administration about those new positions. During a budget hearing on Nov. 12, she thanked them for understanding what was at stake.
“Housing is a human right, but housing is not only a roof over someone’s head — it is ensuring that housing is humane and that it is not creating further implications on someone’s health and well-being,” she said at that hearing.
Caldwell expects to post the job openings and get them filled early in the year, but the finer points of the job duties are still a work in progress.
Right now, she said, she is comfortable with the ability of the nine investigators on the team to respond to the volume of complaints the department receives. She envisions the new inspector serving in a senior role of sorts, maintaining relationships with advocacy groups and focusing on ongoing enforcement actions.
Decisions about when it is appropriate to step up enforcement actions — from giving notices to issuing fines — are made by Matsuda, fellow program supervisor Tara Olson and Caldwell herself, she said.
Crunching data to target enforcement
The data analyst position will likely focus on breaking down complaints to look for geographic hotspots, Caldwell said — and also to determine where in the city tenants are logging few or no complaints, and why that might be. That person can also respond to data requests from advocates and share information with the public.
“Where we need support is on the higher-level enforcement action side,” Caldwell said. “We need folks who can support us in issuing fines in a timelier fashion, in looking at our data. We are looking for a data analyst who can help us figure out where to target our enforcement.”
She added: “We can conduct a million inspections, but if we don’t have the tools to solve the broader issues and look at the problems more holistically, what are we doing?”
Eida Altman is the director of the Metro Denver Tenants Union, a membership organization dedicated to supporting renters and holding landlords accountable across the metro area.
Altman is grateful for the compromise the mayor’s office agreed to on the new position on the inspection team. She has been critical of DDPHE’s response times to concerns at known problem properties in the past, but Altman puts that largely on a lack of sufficient staffing.
“We want to see proactive investigations be better supported. They’re really important,” Altman said. “We hope that the analyst position will be able to ensure that the agency has metrics. If we want to be able to justify growing it … we need to have goals and metrics and justify it and remediate that cost.”
Altman already has her sights set on another gap she has identified in Denver’s approach to ensuring rental housing is habitable. The city’s fledgling landlord licensing program hinges on independent third-party inspections.
CBZ Management’s three Denver properties were all inspected by the same independent inspector on the same day in January 2023, and they received passing grades despite city records showing a long history of complaints from tenants at those properties.
Altman wants to see DDPHE’s inspection program reach a point where it can follow up on those third-party checks — performed by inspectors paid by the property owners themselves — and provide supplemental investigations to ensure landlords are living up to the city’s code.
“It needs to be a licensing program,” she said, “not just a registry.”
Roughly 25,000 rental properties have been licensed in the city to date, according to Excise and Licenses spokesman Eric Escudero. Instances of landlords receiving passing inspections for that program and then being reported to DDPHE are exceedingly rare, he said.
“We’re seeing landlords get licenses, and a majority of them are doing upkeep, doing maintenance,” Escudero said. “We know that we’re probably never going to have a city without a single slumlord, but the number is going down.”
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