Fire Inside Abandoned House Has Neighbors Frustrated With Derelict Property Program

On November 8, the home at 4463 Winona Court was billowing smoke and on fire, and neighbors were hardly surprised.

“When you have a home that's abandoned and has this much hoarding inside of it, it truly is a tinder box,” says Nate Boyer, who lives next door. “They cannot get the flames to where they will stop smoldering because of how much stuff is in there.”

Boyer says he watched the Denver Fire Department work for hours to contain the fire. He’s thankful he was home when it started, because he fears his property could have gone ablaze, too. Smoke from the fire poured toward Boyer's home, leaving him worried about the possible effects on his wife, who is pregnant, and the inside of his house.

“When you've got sixty-year-old newspapers and magazines…there were boxes of eight-tracks that caught on fire. It's a pretty disgusting smoke,” Boyer says of the contents of the burning house. “I had to air [my] house out for a few days.”

Boyer and others in the Berkeley neighborhood have watched the property deteriorate for years. The home, on Denver’s Neglected and Derelict Building list since May 2023, isn’t just full of stuff, either. People often squat there, according to neighbors, who say they regularly see drug deals and trash on the lawn, and often worry about their safety.

“I've never seen anything like it,” says nearby resident Janet Carlander. “It is absolutely filled to the brim with junk and trash. I don't think homeless people brought it into there. I think it was left that way by the last tenants, or whoever was there last."

Property tax records show Carol Deerfield owns the property and lives in Arvada, but there is no contact information available for Carol or her husband, Ron.

“What I've been trying to do is use the city as a lever to force their hand, and I think the city is trying to do that,” Boyer says.

When he has made reports about the home, the Department of Community Planning & Development has sent someone over within about 24 hours, Boyer says. Still, assessing fines hasn’t seemed to work.

According to Ryan Huff, communications director for CPD, the department added the 4463 Winona Court home to the NADB list after a complaint about unauthorized people coming and going. In the past eighteen months, CPD has had to board up the property nine times, he adds.

Carlander says she can tell when city workers come, because boards are back on the home and junk is cleared from the yard. However, she's also aware when wanderers break back in each time. Before the fire, she observed plywood taken down from one of the windows.

Huff says CPD has issued eight citations to the property, with some of them escalated to fines earlier this year after the owners were unresponsive and failed to file a remedial plan.

Thus far, CPD has issued $24,375 in fines this year to the property owner.

“This includes citations, NADB penalties, and cost recovery for boarding up and abatements/cleanup,” Huff says. “Our next steps are to board the structure again and order a cleanup of the exterior. CPD handles these actions and bills the property owner.”

Because this property has gotten so out of control, CPD plans to schedule a show-cause hearing in January for the property owner to explain why the city should not take additional enforcement actions, which can include a civil penalty of $999 per day, Huff says.
Boyer hopes the city will be able to take over the home via a receivership after the show-cause hearing, because he doesn’t think fines or boarding up the home's exterior are enough to fix the problem.

“We want to protect the safety, prosperity, health and welfare of all city residents,” Huff says. “We hold property owners accountable. … We do monthly inspections of neglected properties and aim to make them safe and not accessible.”

But those efforts haven’t been enough for accountability at this property, even though neighbors say they believe the city is doing what it can. They wish CPD had more resources, or more power, to act.

Boyer wishes the same of the Denver Police Department, which he believes isn’t able to do much beyond arresting anyone who squats at the house who already has a warrant out for their arrest.

“When there are people who are in there illegally and neither the city nor DPD can do anything to actually remove them, that's pretty challenging as the person that lives next door,” Boyer says.

Carlander says more information about what stage a property is at in the derelict building program could be helpful. Although she could go over to the house and read the latest fine or notice posted on the door, she wasn’t able to learn much online.

“It would be helpful to have a little bit more transparency,” she says. “It seems like it takes really long. ... This house has been lingering there for a while, and everyone in the neighborhood could see that it was a potential risk, and then, sure enough, the worst situation happened, where it burned."

The city is working on gathering quotes for a cleanup crew to clear the trash and burned debris, according to CPD.

Abandoned and derelict buildings have become an increasing problem in Denver since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to CPD. Between 2016 and 2019, the department closed 210 cases of neglected and derelict buildings, either through compliance improvement or demolition. However, by 2022 that number went down to just thirty cases closed in 2022 and twenty in 2023.

A fourplex at 457-461 South Lincoln Street sat for nearly a year after the building exploded in August 2023. Although a CPD spokesperson said the owner of the property wasn't "as responsive as the city would hope,” the department was able to get in touch with the owner, who eventually applied for proper demolition permits.

In June, Huff told Westword that property owners often say they had planned to remodel but then lost funding, and that "historically high interest rates factor into this, too."