The number of eviction cases going to court in Denver has skyrocketed above pre-pandemic norms — a trend that started in 2023.
“The numbers are appalling,” said attorney Zach Neumann, head of the Community Economic Defense Project, a legal group representing tenants facing eviction statewide. “It's really bad.”
This year, landlords have filed about 11,000 eviction cases in Denver County Court, according to court data. Despite record amounts of city money going to eviction prevention, the city is on track to break the record number of cases set last year.
The 1,641 eviction cases filed in August — the second highest monthly number in more than a decade — represented close to 3,500 individuals who faced housing insecurity, since many rentals are home to multiple people, Neumann estimated.
Renter advocates say it’s a result of continuously rising rent prices — and the data shows that evictions are running significantly higher than they were in 2019, the last comparable year before the pandemic.
Hundreds of people are calling for help.
Last Tuesday, in a three-hour period, the Community Economic Defense Project’s call center received 600 phone calls from people looking for housing stability services. That number does not include text messages and emails. Calls for help tend to surge at the beginning of the month, when many tenants owe rent and landlords are moving toward eviction.
Meanwhile, there were 230 households due in court to respond to eviction lawsuits on a single day — a particularly busy day that resulted, at least in part, from higher eviction rates.
“We were scrambling,” Neumann said. And so were the other groups like Colorado Legal Services and the Colorado Poverty Law Project. “It makes it really tough.”
Those numbers demonstrate the demand for help, he said. A report from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University notes that 52 percent of households facing eviction have at least one child in them.
“The resources just don't match what we're seeing,” Neumann said.
So how did Denver eviction filings rise so high?
“Rents are dramatically out of step with wages,” Neumann said. “We see all kinds of cases, but 99 percent of the cases we see are people who have jobs and their jobs just don't pay enough money.”
A recent Zillow study found that Denver rental costs have been growing faster than wages are increasing — with rent going up by 23 percent from 2019 to 2023, while wages grew by about 20 percent. That is a smaller disparity than in several other metropolitan areas, but it comes on top of years of rising rents.
Drew Hamrick, the senior vice president of government affairs at the Apartment Association of Metro Denver, says there’s a simpler explanation: “The eviction numbers are a reflection of the growth of rental units,” he said. The city of Denver has added nearly 8,000 apartment units in this year alone, according to the Apartment Association’s data.
“There’s always going to be some percentage of default that goes along with that,” Hamrick said.
But eviction cases are growing even faster than the number of apartments. While the city’s apartment stock has grown by about 6 percent over the last year, the rate of eviction cases is running more than 30 percent higher in 2024.
The same trend holds up over a longer time period. Denver has about 20 percent more apartments now than it did in 2019, according to Apartment Association data. But evictions in 2024 year-to-date are up about 80 percent compared to the same period in 2019.
Eviction numbers are also increasing this year as pandemic assistance programs disappear.
During the pandemic, the federal government called an eviction moratorium and poured millions into rent stabilization programs. The result was a radical drop in eviction case filings and people staying housed.
The Biden administration’s eviction moratorium was overthrown by the Supreme Court in August of 2021. Afterward, the number of eviction cases started rising. Federal and state rental assistance programs helped keep many of those tenants housed, but that money has largely dried up.
“This year really was the year when a lot of those resources went away,” explained Melissa Thate, the housing stability director for the Denver Department of Housing Stability, or HOST.
With state and federal help fading away, the city is now using more local government dollars to keep people in their homes.
But both city officials and tenant advocates say they need more money to keep people in their homes. Neumann questions whether the nearly $30 million the city has to spend on rental assistance will be enough to fund the program through the end of the year.
“We've provided more than $15 million so far in direct assistance to just under 2,000 households,” Thate said. “We do still have about $12.8 million remaining, and so we do anticipate being able to … serve folks through the end of the year.”
The city is still determining its 2025 budget, so it’s still unknown how much Denver will contribute to the continued effort.
How is Denver stretching eviction support? Fewer people qualify.
Under new rules, people who have just received an eviction notice from their landlord, and others in the early stages of the eviction process, are no longer eligible to get help.
Now, city assistance is only available to:
- People later in the eviction process who have had a judge say they must move out
- People who have received a utility shut-off notice
- People who have had to move out of their previous home and already have secured a new unit.
With assistance arriving later, some tenants have literally gotten help with rent money just as sheriff’s deputies came knocking to evict them.
There’s one eviction number that is heading down.
While there are a lot more court cases being filed, a smaller portion of those cases is ending with sheriff’s deputies knocking on renter’s doors
The percentage of court cases that are ending in a physical eviction by Denver sheriff’s deputies has dropped from 59 percent in 2019 to 47 percent in 2023.
There could be two explanations. In some cases, tenants will “self-evict” to avoid facing a court order. But in others, the eviction case might be dropped for a happier reason — the renter got help with paying the rent.
“It's more important to look at how many people are being displaced versus how many eviction actions are filed,” Hamrick said. He argued that efforts to stop cases from ending in evictions are working.
“If you're lucky enough to receive rental assistance, it is stabilizing,” Neumann said. “And it addresses the rental debt balance, and it allows you to continue your tenancy.”
Are there solutions to the rise in Denver eviction filings?
Thate points to an eviction prevention program in Philadelphia that requires mandatory mediation between tenants and landlords before a court case is filed.
“It seems to be really effective,” Thate said. “And landlords and tenants seem to be aligned on it. They just made the program permanent, and they've seen a significant reduction in eviction filings.”
For a Philadelphia-style eviction diversion program to happen Denver, Thate said, would require a change to state law.
“Another way to address this, though, would be to make it harder to evict people and make it take a lot longer,” Neumann said. “Obviously, the funds that are needed here are driven by the fact that rents are high and it is easy to evict. And if you were to toggle those two factors, you wouldn't need as much emergency stabilization work.”
Landlords have generally pushed back on renters' rights efforts at the Capitol, including failed efforts to allow rent control, as well as new laws that lengthen the eviction process, saying that they could result in building owners getting stuck with problematic tenants and losing money.
Slowing down the eviction process could also increase legal costs for landlords who may pass those expenses on to the tenants, further increasing the cost of rent, Hamrick argued.
Other solutions Neumann points to include increasing public and social housing, increasing the federal voucher program, giving people a monthly stipend, and increasing the supply of housing.
“You can evict someone in a month in Colorado,” Neumann said. “That is not the case in a lot of states in the U.S.. That is a policy choice that we make here, but it drives the need for both rapid and extensive services and creates an emergency drill every time that someone is unable to pay their rent. And that is not the case in other parts of the country.”
If you’re a landlord or tenant with experience with the eviction process who would like to share your story, send us a note at [email protected].
