When Brandon Smith moved to Denver in April of 2021, he was recovering from ACL surgery. Smith moved into an apartment on the fourth floor of Mint Urban Infinity, a set of nine buildings with 561 units in Virginia Village, with the assurance that the building had an elevator.
But the elevators rarely worked, Smith said, and that was just the start of his problems at the complex.
Over the past few years, Smith and other tenants at Mint Urban Infinity have raised the alarm about broken AC during hot summer months, broken doors, piled up trash, a week without hot water and a string of other maintenance issues.
"It was a nightmare to live in Urban Infinity," Smith said. "It was just constant stress in a place that I should feel safe. The one place people should feel safe is in their home, and if that's an apartment, they should feel safe there, and nobody felt safe."
Now, Smith is suing property management company Cardinal Group Management, property owners Glendale Properties I and Glendale Properties II and Mapletree Investments, a real estate investment company based in Singapore.
But he's not just suing on behalf of himself; Smith hopes to turn the case into a class action lawsuit to involve other tenants.
Tenants filed the suit in 2021, but the case took a step forward Thursday, when lawyers went before Denver District Court to argue over class action certification, which will decide whether or not the case can move forward as a class action.
If a judge approves, the lawsuit could come to represent people who lived in more than 500 units between 2018 and 2022 (a new management company took over in the fall of last year), and potentially anyone who paid certain move-out fees to the management company while tenants.
Jason Legg, one of the tenants' lawyers, said class action certification would be a big deal in a case like this. It would mean the difference between potential restitution for hundreds of tenants, versus a handful of people with the time and resources to go to court.
"It's extremely rare for tenants to bring class actions against their landlords, but we've begun to do so because we're seeing systemic abuses and violations of tenants' rights," Legg said.
Tenants have complained for years about conditions at Mint Urban Infinity apartments.
The complex's broken air conditioning conditions made headlines during the especially hot 2021 summer, and for a gas line break that led to a week without hot water. During Thursday's hearing, tenants and property staff testified to piled up trash, pests, overflowing dumpsters, faulty fire safety equipment and other maintenance issues.
Attorneys for the management company and owners said they were working on resolving the issues and attributed many of the maintenance problems to supply chain slowdowns brought by COVID-19. The attorneys also argued that since the issues affected people differently, a class action lawsuit would not be appropriate. Cardinal Group Management and the company's lawyers declined to comment on the case directly to Denverite.
Attorneys for the tenants said that all landlords were dealing with supply chain issues during the pandemic, and that many of the problems at Mint Urban Infinity began before then.
Smith said he talked to hundreds of fellow tenants when he lived at the complex, and that he knows the problems are universal, which is why he is seeking a class action.
"Talking to these people, the consensus was they had all the same issues, and that's why we're seeking class action," Smith said. "It's not that 'Susan had difficulty getting to the sixth floor without an elevator because she's old.' It's, 'Everybody had a problem getting upstairs, constantly, move-in, move-out, groceries, whatever.' Everything applied to everybody."
Vivian Szejer lived on the fourth floor of one of the buildings, and said she broke her wrist tripping down a flight of stairs when the elevator was broken. Szejer was undergoing cancer treatment at the time, and struggled to climb the stairs and carry groceries. She called the apartment complex "dirty and filthy."
"Sometimes trash would accumulate by the dumpsters for more than a week before the trash would come and pick up, and it had nothing to do with COVID. That was not new," she said.
When the hot water went out, Szejer said she rarely received communication from management and only got help when she reached out to City Council. Her daughter, Sara Morgan, said the doors to the buildings frequently broke, and that people experiencing homelessness would often sleep inside the building and live in the storage units.
"They definitely weren't taking care of the problems," Morgan said of building management.
For Szejer, conditions at Mint Urban Infinity reflect bigger challenges with housing in Denver. She added that she was afraid to leave because she worried that any other apartment at her price-point would have similar or worse problems.
"Sadly, more and more apartment complexes in Denver were coming forward with issues that they were going through and I didn't want to jump from the frying pan into the fire," Szejer said.
And so, like many others struggling with housing, Szejer left Denver. She now rents a house in Loveland and is "loving every second" of it.
If the judge grants class action certification, the case will go to trial. If not, the tenants could appeal or move forward to trial with just the four original tenants bringing the suit.
The judge's decision could take weeks and will be crucial in determining the scope of the case.
"The idea why class actions are so important is that it's vulnerable people who can't typically afford a lawyer," Legg said. "It's the only real way to get substantial justice for a broadly impacted group of people, and so this issue is really important."
In response to lawsuits like this one, some landlords have begun inserting clauses in leases requiring tenants to waive their right to class action suits as a condition of signing their lease. State Rep. Steven Woodrow, one of the lawyers representing tenants in the Mint Urban Infinity case, sponsored a state law that would prohibit clauses like this in leases. It's currently awaiting Gov. Jared Polis' signature.
Smith feels confident about his chances, but he is also thinking bigger. Denver-based Cardinal Group Management manages dozens of properties all across the country, many of which are targeted toward lower income earners and students who cannot afford to go to court. Smith said that once he started his case, he heard from people across the country with similar issues with the management company.
"I would ideally like to see a bigger investigation, either nationally or state by state," he said. "They made the wrong person angry."
