Four months ago, the kitchen sink in Brenda Mendoza’s Rifle apartment started leaking. Water poured onto the floor and then seeped into the downstairs ceiling, spilling through the light fixture.
“It looked like it was raining,” she said in Spanish.
Mendoza, who has two children, ages 6 and 12, and pays $2,500 in rent, called the property manager repeatedly about the leak, but he has yet to address the issue. She even found a plumber on her own, but he didn’t want to intervene without the landlord’s authorization.
Now, the ceiling has coffee-colored stains, potentially a sign of black mold, which carries health risks.
“A lot of people tell me it's bad,” Mendoza said. “Like everything's rotten in there, that it's mold or something, and that it's very, very bad for the children.”
On Tuesday, she came to a clinic at the public library in Rifle about housing law seeking advice. The event was part of a weeklong series of free bilingual information sessions that took place in communities from Aspen to Parachute.
Jennifer Wherry, the executive director of Alpine Legal Services, which organized the series, said that the clinic was meant as a “housing law 101” of sorts for both tenants and landlords.
In a presentation, housing law attorney Anna Belinski went over some common topics, including the laws protecting tenants, basic housing standards that landlords must provide, and the eviction process.
That information is particularly important as sky-high rents and a chronic housing shortage in the Roaring Fork Valley and surrounding region have left many tenants in vulnerable situations.
In that way, Mendoza’s experience is not unusual. Belinski said leaks, mold, and rodents or infestations of some kind, are common occurrences among the cases she sees — a violation of what’s called the “warrant of habitability,” a Colorado law that requires rental units meet minimum safety and health standards, regardless of whether tenants have a written lease.
“People will deal with a lot more from their landlord, or deal with unhealthy, unsafe living conditions for a lot longer because they don't feel like they can move,” she said.
Approximately 70% of Belinski’s cases involve helping people facing eviction. The main cause: falling behind on rent.
“Rarely does the client say, ‘Okay, I'll just leave,’” said Belinski. “Because for most people, they can't, or they don't feel that they can, because the cost of living is so high and they don't have savings. They're spending so much of their income on rent that they don't have anything saved up for the first month, last month, and security deposit for a new place.”
The consequences of an eviction can be significant and far-reaching, often leading to homelessness, job loss, and worsening poverty. According to The Eviction Lab, women are evicted 16% more than men, with women of color facing even higher rates.
Belinksi noted that one recourse tenants have is forming or joining tenant associations. These groups are becoming more popular throughout the country, giving renters in apartment complexes or who have a common landlord that owns several properties a way to advocate collectively.
Identifying shared issues and bringing them to a landlord’s attention together is a lot more effective than doing so on an individual basis, said Belinski. She noted that tenant associations — much like worker unions — have staged protests in different apartment complexes to raise the alarm about certain systemic problems.
In other words, tenant associations help even out the inherent power imbalance between renters and landlords, and in many cases have led to resolutions, from addressing rent increases and poor maintenance, to promoting fair housing practices.
“It's a really great way to give voice to people who are disproportionately lacking in power,” Belinski said.
