Ashley Arias is certain she got hypothermia in her own apartment.
As she recovered from a cancer surgery that left her more susceptible to cold, the temperatures in her $1,400-a-month apartment dipped into the 50s due to heating problems, she told Denverite.
“I had all of the symptoms — of the shivering and not feeling like you can control your body and the slurred speech,” she said. “The drowsiness and the shallow breathing, the low energy, everything that you would expect from hypothermia.”
The elementary school teacher is one of dozens of people to complain to city officials about the Raven, a sprawling 418-unit complex in southeast Denver. In a class-action lawsuit filed Friday by Arias and three other tenants, she alleged that her heat has not worked since October 2025, and that her unit was without hot water for nearly all of January.
The complaints might surprise people who only see the building from the outside, Arias noted. The three-story white-and-blue complex features fire pits and warmly colored decking. But the lawsuit is the latest escalation in renters’ years-long battle against a landlord they say has failed to keep the property warm and clean.
The lawsuit notes that complaints about hot water, heating and infestations continued for months without resolution. The lawsuit alleges that both the community’s pools are "nonfunctional" and that, at one point, “the corpse of a deceased dog was left to break down in the vacant swimming pool.”
The building has faced escalating pressure from the city, too.
The Raven has operated without a landlord’s license for more than three years — ever since the city first started requiring it.
It has racked up at least 90 complaints and 24 citations totaling about $50,000 from city inspectors. Late last year, city officials filed a criminal citation to force the landlords to court — only the second time a rental licensing issue has escalated into criminal territory.
The building is owned by an LLC called Loft 9 Apartments Owner. City officials have struggled for months to contact the owner. Instead, they have communicated only with Apartment Management Consultants, according to city records.
Both companies are named as defendants in the lawsuit, as is former manager Trion Properties.
“Despite frequent complaints from tenants, investigations resulting in notices of violations from the City of Denver enforcement authorities, a tenant organization and media coverage, Defendants failed to respond with full remediation of unlivable conditions, leaving their tenants to live without heat during cold winter months, consistently without hot water, with an unabated infestation of roaches, bed bugs and mice throughout the complex alongside other unlivable conditions,” the lawsuit states.
A tenants union has been a major support for the Raven residents.
Eida Altman, director of the Denver Metro Tenants Union, has been helping tenants to organize for years.
Starting in fall 2023, the group “found tenants in units in their apartments bundled up without heat. Some could see their breath in their apartments. We found families who would boil water on the stove to pour it in cold baths because they also lacked hot water. We saw mold, we saw crumbling ceilings,” Altman said in an interview.
City records filed in court noted at least 15 units where inspectors appeared to encounter heat issues in one long-running case.
“We saw serious pest infestations, trash piled up around the property, including illegal dumping. The laundry rooms and other facilities were either shut down or completely destroyed,” she said.
One of the plaintiffs, Devon Berkowitz, said her unit’s hot water was unreliable for the entirety of her three-month tenancy — and that she still faced a $1,700 fee for breaking her lease.
Tenants have gotten some results over the years. Their lobbying helped spur reforms to Colorado's landlord laws. City inspectors have cited the complex dozens of times in response to scores of complaints, mostly for health concerns, according to city records.
“What was different here is that tenants were organized and had created so much sunlight on the issue and had submitted so many complaints to the city … that it elicited a proactive investigation by the city,” Altman said.
But the problems still haven’t been resolved, even with the city’s move toward criminal charges and now the lawsuit.
“Right now, I can't say that things have really changed,” Altman said.
The city also noted long delays from the landlord. City official Tara Olson noted the building took nearly two years to resolve a city case about heat complaints.
“No, I would not say that compliance was promptly achieved,” Olson noted in an email to a colleague.
The landlord ultimately settled that complaint by obtaining an engineer’s report that said the building’s boilers could theoretically handle the building’s needs — though it didn’t assess if they were actually performing up to snuff.
What's at stake in the lawsuits
The lawsuit asks a judge to certify a class, allowing the plaintiffs to represent all renters in a similar situation in the building. It seeks damages to be determined at trial and was filed in district court, with the plaintiffs represented by the law firm Sue My Landlord.
Another plaintiff, Benjamin Stark, also sued the owner and manager Thursday over habitability issues. Stark is represented by the Community Economic Defense Project.
The criminal citation in the licensing case could come with a fine of up to $999 and a year in jail.
While criminal penalties are rare for licensing violations, they’re more common for landlords who fail to address health issues.
Those larger fines and criminal penalties are “reserved for the worst landlords and we are determined to use those tools to help people paying thousands of dollars a month and forced to live in rental properties that are not safe. “Our overall goal remains to make Denver the safest place in America to rent a home.”
But Altman wants the city to be more aggressive with problem landlords, saying even thousands of dollars of fines don’t affect large companies.
“This is really a drop in the bucket, it’s not a cost that changes the behavior of the landlord, it’s the cost of doing business,” she said.
Nearly 29,000 landlords are licensed in Denver, and the city continues to receive hundreds of applications. With compliance becoming more common, the city “can now refocus our efforts on the worst landlords,” Escudero continued.
Meanwhile, Ashley Arias is making do with space heaters, warm clothes and her dog. She can’t afford to move. Instead, she’s hoping for a change.
“It would be such a nice place to live if we were able to live in a safe, clean place — and we knew that our rent money was going towards taking care of the place that we're renting,” she said.
The property’s management did not respond to a request for comment.
