“I thought maybe I just didn't take out the trash,” she remembers. “Then I went into the bathroom, and water was everywhere.”
Her bathroom sink had flooded. She says maintenance came by and told her it wasn’t that bad and that the bottom panel of her cabinet just needed to be replaced — but no one ever came to replace it.
For the past two months, Jowers has been trying to get her apartment complex, Bell Cherry Hills — made up of two buildings at 3650 South Broadway and 3670 South Lincoln Street in Englewood, just outside of Cherry Hills Village — to remediate black mold in her unit.
So far, she's been unsuccessful.
“Last month, I started noticing that I wasn't feeling good,” Jowers recalls. “My health is, like, very much at risk. My dog is sick. I was coughing and throwing up mucus yesterday, and my symptoms are all getting worse.”
She fears that the mold just festered during the time that she was left waiting for repairs. When someone finally came by on April 4 to replace the bottom of her cabinet, mold was everywhere once the wood was ripped out, but the maintenance staff only swapped out the paneling, she says.
Samantha Jowers is worried that unremediated black mold in her apartment is making her sick.
Samantha Jowers
She’s not the only resident at Bell Cherry Hills having problems. Fellow tenant Eliza Hammond sent a Warranty of Habitability notice to Bell Partners on March 1 related to a lack of exterior garbage receptacles, broken elevators and broken locks on exterior doors.
Residents Allege Untimely Repairs and Lack of Safety
“I believe the issue described above presents a materially dangerous or hazardous condition to my life, health and/or safety,” Hammond wrote in her notice to Bell Partners. “I am hereby directing you to fix the problem.”Bell Partners replied through the Ortiz & Doyle law firm, stating that Hammond was wrong about the trash accumulation. It also told her that Bell Partners is working to repair the elevator, which has been broken since February.
“Finally, with regard to your allegation that there are currently exterior gates or door handles broken at the property, please be advised that the site team acts promptly to repair broken door handles, locks, and gates as soon as they become aware of the issue,” the letter said.
The reply then listed several locks and gates the company is in the process of repairing. Lastly, the response said that although it believes it hasn’t violated any state laws, Bell Partners would allow Hammond to break her lease without the termination fee, which amounts to two months' rent.
Hammond isn’t satisfied with the response.
“If they're making repairs but those repairs aren't working as permanent fixes, and every single week the locks and the gates are breaking, that, to me, is not really addressing the issue,” she says. “You're kind of just giving us all the middle finger.”
She believes the company is ignoring the myriad of problems at the complex, which bills itself as “a clever collection of high-end homes and resort-inspired extras” on its website.
“Resident satisfaction is a top priority at every one of our more than 85,000 managed units across the U.S. including at Bell Cherry Hills in Englewood, Colorado,” Bell Partners says in a statement. “The on-site team is in constant communication with our residents on all maintenance requests, and our associates consistently work to resolve said requests in a timely manner."
But even smaller repairs, like broken appliances, take weeks to happen, according to Hammond and Jowers, who have had broken dishwashers and toilets while living there. Hammond provided videos of overflowing trash bins and other piles of trash around the property as well as documentation of broken locks. She pays $58 per month for parking but says cars are regularly broken into in the lot.
Daniel McKelvy, another resident, says vagrants cut a hole in one of the fences leading into the complex and were sleeping in an unlocked storage room. He says management never notified tenants about the broken fence or acted to repair it until he discovered it from a neighbor and asked Bell Partners to do something about it. At that point, he says, they acknowledged they were aware of the problem.
“They decided to sweep it under the rug and not tell anybody,” McKelvy says. “I was really frustrated about that.”
Residents are also frustrated by the high rate of fire alarms that go off around the property.
“Since I've moved in two years ago, probably a dozen times there's been fire alarms that have been going off, and they blame it on faulty parts or parts that keep failing,” Hammond says.
When McKelvy moved in, he noticed his fire alarm was beeping because it needed a new battery. Despite telling Bell Partners on his move-in inspection sheet, property management never came around to replace the battery. He eventually did it himself.
The fire extinguisher cabinets in the parking garage of the Broadway building sit empty, which Hammond reported to the Englewood fire marshal. She also filed a Colorado Open Records Act request and found 26 fire marshal incidents at the Broadway address and 41 at the Lincoln address since 2017.
“We have received a complaint for this property and have a follow-up inspection scheduled, and are currently working with property management,” Mike Smith, the Englewood fire marshal, says. Smith can't say when the inspection will occur, citing an open investigation, but adds that he is "still working with property management."
Both McKelvy and Hammond pay nearly $2,000 per month for their one-bedroom apartments. Their base rent is lower, but once parking, a trash services fee and a package fee are added on, it adds up. Residents must pay $20 for a third-party delivery service called Fetch each month, too, which is also a point of contention.
“We have a mail room,” Hammond says. “They used to have those, like, Amazon lockers where people were getting packages delivered to those lock boxes. They've stripped those out. They no longer receive any sort of package deliveries at the front office.”
Now, packages are delivered to an address in Centennial and then personally carried to each door. That means people can’t get grocery or food delivery, according to Hammond, who has missed out on several packages because she couldn’t be home during her designated delivery time from Fetch.
There are lawsuits against Bell Partners in six other states, and one in Colorado accusing several large property management companies, including Bell Partners, of price fixing. That complaint, filed by resident Jeffrey Weaver and alleging that the companies have broken federal antitrust laws, is currently in the U.S. District Court for Colorado.
Hammond has been asking around the complex to see if other residents are having similar problems, and has reached out to a few lawyers about the potential for a lawsuit.
“I really want there to be some accountability, because I know this isn't just something that's happening at this property,” she says.
In the meantime, Jowers is getting health tests and environmental testing done on her apartment to determine if she has enough of a case to file a lawsuit over the mold in her apartment.
