That example is just one of many in her district, Sawyer says, and she knows that each of Denver’s ten other council districts have their own issues with problem properties. But when residents reach out about properties that their owners have abandoned — resulting in garbage on lawns, fires started by squatters looking for shelter or crumbling infrastructure — councilmembers often can’t fix the situation.
That’s because of what Sawyer has dubbed the problem property “doom loop,” where there are so many city agencies involved that no one agency can actually help residents effectively.
The Department of Community Planning & Development oversees Denver’s neglected and derelict building registry, the Denver Department of Public Health & Environment is in charge of potential health issues, the Department of Excise & Licenses can get involved if the property is being rented out, and the Denver Police Department’s community resource officers are in charge of wellness checks. And that lineup doesn’t begin to cover every agency that can be part of the doom loop, according to Sawyer, whose staff worked to identify nine city agencies that regularly interact with problem properties.
“What we see happen in the District 5 council office is that it's our police and our sheriffs who are ending up cleaning this up,” Sawyer said at a December 9 council committee meeting. “We have, as a council, said that one of our priorities is that we no longer have our police and sheriffs doing the work that is not police- and sheriff-related, and yet this is one instance where this continues to happen.”
When there is criminal activity and the building gets turned over to the DPD and the Denver City Attorney’s Office, that immediately expedites resolution, she noted, but when the problem falls under civil rules, properties linger and neighbors suffer until something bad enough to pull in law enforcement happens.
According to Sawyer, most city departments lack a way to resolve problems beyond issuing fines and citations to bad owners who aren’t responsive to those tools, or offering optional resources to residents who may simply choose to decline.
“We have all of these different agencies that can do very limited things, but no point agency, so a city council office ends up sort of being that point agency without access to all the information, and then there are really no good outcomes,” Sawyer said.
Not only are there no good outcomes for residents, but Sawyer’s research found that city staffers are frustrated by the constant problem property issues that they just can’t solve. Staffing challenges are one reason that city agencies aren’t as active on the issue as they’d like, Sawyer found, so the problem is compounding.
“Our jobs are to connect people to resources, and there's no resource to connect them to in this instance except for continuing to board up the house,” council president Amanda Sandoval said at the committee meeting. “That's not solving the problem, it's just boarding up a house.”
Sawyer has some ideas for how to combat the doom loop. Her office identified both legislative and operational fixes, and while council can tackle the legislative side, the operational items are up to the mayor’s office — which Sawyer said hasn’t shown much interest in making the problem property doom loop a priority.
Ideas to Close Doom Loop for Denver Problem Properties
Operational changes include identifying a lead agency for the issues, which Sawyer believes should be the Office of Neighborhood Safety. Additionally, she wants the city’s human resources department to examine pay regulations for inspectors who do the work on the ground and for the police department to gain access to the city’s internal tracking database so that officers can see if there are civil complaints at a property they may be responding to. This year, the DDPHE has been working with the City Attorney’s Office to update the rules around how its inspectors can get better health incomes for residents, something Sawyer also believes could help with the doom loop. Tackling an update of the city’s minimum habitability standards, which the DDPHE inspects for, is one of Sawyer’s legislative ideas.
“We need to take a look at those and be really thoughtful about how we know our residents are living and what we can do to help support them by making some changes to that,” Sawyer said.
Councilmember-at-large Sarah Parady said she and fellow at-large councilmember Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez are interested in examining and making changes to those minimum habitability standards.
Along with looking at those rules, Sawyer is already working with councilmembers Paul Kashmann and Jamie Torres on an update to the city's vacant and derelict property and public nuisance ordinances. Sawyer also emphasized the need to add funding for city departments involved in the doom loop so that they can hire more employees to focus on problem properties in the next budget cycle.
She also thinks council could help publicize information about programs designed to help property owners maintain their properties, using the example of a program in the Department of Housing Stability that provides property owners of naturally occurring affordable housing funding to invest in upgrades to the property in exchange for a portion of the property becoming deed-restricted affordable housing.
Because Sawyer hasn’t had success with getting the mayor’s office on board, she called on her fellow councilmembers to make ending the doom loop a priority.
“If we are united as a council in our priority for solving this challenge, then that helps give the mayor's office the support that they need to start really looking at making this a priority and solving this challenge,” she said.
Nearly every member present at the December 9 committee meeting agreed to support Sawyer's plan and pledged to work on some aspect of the issue.
