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Colorado Renter: 'I Don't Feel Like Renters Have A Lot Of Rights'

By Libby Smith

AURORA, Colo. (CBS4) - With an over-abundance of renters in the Denver metro area market, some say landlords are taking advantage of the situation and not doing proper maintenance on their properties.

Yolanda McCloud and her family are among the renters struggling in the current market. She, her husband, and her two children used to live in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood.

"My mother still lives two blocks away from where we used to live," McCloud told CBS4.

Yolanda McCloud
Yolanda McCloud (Credit CBS)

She had family, her kids' schools, and the security of growing up in that neighborhood. But then she rented a house in the neighborhood and started noticing problems.

"The furnace went out. It was just freezing. It was like, 'You've got to do something. You've got to do something.'" McCloud explained.

The ceilings in the basement leaked, the water pressure was weak.

"Just electrical going on and off, and constantly having to go out and flip the breakers," she said.

While the landlord fixed some of the problems, McCloud said that the house was hazardous.

"Because I felt like maybe one day, me and my husband were going to be gone and my kids were going to be there and something was going to catch on fire," McCloud explained.

Xcel Energy agreed. A safety inspection revealed a potentially dangerous condition exists in the heating system. When Denver's Department of Environmental Health came out, they found numerous code violations. An electrician declared the service panel was a fire hazard.

Hazard
(Credit CBS)

"We just really felt like it was our lives, our kids' lives if we continued to let it go," McCloud said.

McCloud said she notified the landlord and asked for repairs. When nothing was done, she withheld $400 out of the rent.

"So that's when we ended up with a three-day notice," she said.

In California, New Mexico and Nevada, what McCloud did would have been acceptable. It's within the law to withhold rent until major maintenance issues are addressed. In Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona and Utah, McCloud could have paid for the repairs and deducted the amount from the rent. In Colorado, McCloud was at fault for not paying her rent in full.

There's nothing regulating a lot of these really important issues," said Andrea Chiriboga-Flor, who works for the advocacy agency, 9to5.

LINK: 9to5

Recently, 9to5 did a survey of renters in the Denver Metro area. They collected 1000 surveys from mostly low-income, minority renters. They found the major barriers that renters face includes:

--Rising cost of rent

--Rising application fees

--Unlimited background checks

--Maintenance issues

Andrea
Andrea Chiriboga-Flor with surveys of renters (Credit CBS)

"So if you're complaining about maintenance issues, you could just get evicted instead of having that situation fixed," Chiriboga-Flor explained.

That's exactly what happened to McCloud and her family. She went to court hoping to plead her case.

"The judge told us … he said, 'You do have a case but there's nothing we can do because you didn't pay the $400," McCloud recalled.

Now she has an eviction on her record and the hardship of finding a new place to call home.

"It's kind of scary. And it really made me mad because now it's hard … very, very hard to find a place to live," McCloud said.

Bills to strengthen renters' rights on the state level have failed in the past. Now advocates are looking at what can be done on the city and county government levels.

Libby Smith is a Special Projects Producer at CBS4. If you have a story you'd like to tell CBS4 about, call 303-863-TIPS (8477) or visit the News Tips section.

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