AURORA | For more than a year, Julie Kepford has struggled with how to get problems fixed in her East Colfax Avenue mobile home park rental, plagued with mold, heating and air conditioning problems and a long list of woes making life hard and sometimes unbearable.

In Aurora, she’s not alone.

It’s unclear how many pay rent each month to a landlord for an apartment, a house, a duplex, a mobile home or even a garage and are unable to get help in just making sure the rental home is livable. But the problem is serious enough that city lawmakers are looking at beefing up its rental inspection program and expanding it to include rental homes and odd properties like Kepford’s which is essentially outside Aurora’s regulatory authority.

Renters like Kepford are appealing for the city to help them force landlords to keep rentals repaired and livable inside and out.

“We don’t want to rent for free, we want dignified housing with fair rent,” one Spanish-speaking renter said with the help of a translator at an Aurora City Council meeting in June. That’s when city lawmakers started serious discussions about how to ensure apartments and more are in livable conditions.

Aurora’s hardly alone in trying to ensure rentals meet livability standards, especially in a region where rents are high because availability has been low. But the city garnered international attention over the past few years after three apartments were shut down because the city said they were uninhabitable due to filth, crime and disrepair.

The problem has not only been linked to poorly kept apartment complexes, some of which Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman said were run by “slumlords,” but houses, condos and mobile homes, essentially legally out of reach of city rental inspectors for decades.

But for Kepford, the crisis for her is now.

Since May 2025, Kepford has been renting a unit in Northeast Aurora that she says fell into disrepair due to negligence by property owners. A former feed store, the me owners converted the building into a rental property at the M&M Mobile Home Park managed by Westford Properties LLC. 

The owners of the company live out in Washington state and have been having acquaintances assist in renting out their properties. The owner of Westford Properties, Harvey Westford, declined to comment to the Sentinel. 

The State of Colorado took legal action against M&M Mobile Home Park for the owners’ alleged failure to properly notify residents of contaminated drinking water. The case garnered attention from local news media as the first major enforcement action under a 2023 law called the Mobile Home Park Water Quality Act.

According to Kepford, the unit looked and seemed OK when she moved in. 

Kepford has had to be on disability for a form of autonomic nervous system disorder called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome and multiple issues that come with the disease. Kepford has to use what little stipend she gets from disability sparingly.

“I just wanted an affordable place and [to] have my own space,” Kepford told the Sentinel. 

When Kepford first moved in, her monthly rent was $1,195; after she reported an issue with her heater and carbon monoxide detector, her landlord raised the rent to $1,595 — she believes that the action was retaliatory.

According to Kepford, she’s had problems with her home and landlord for the majority of the time she has lived there. Kepford found a water leak in June 2025. She reported it, but the faulty heating and carbon monoxide detection system took priority.

Kepford had been facing increased health problems over the year when she noticed a warping on her bathroom ceiling. Mold had eaten away at the walls in the bathroom to the point where the surface sinks in when it’s touched.

A hole formed in the ceiling, and the growing mold is easily visible on both sides of the hole. 

Given her previous experience with the landlord, Kepford said she decided to notify Aurora’s code enforcement department about the deteriorating conditions of the property. Kepford said she also attempted to notify M&M regarding the issues, but that the property owners had dragged their feet on the prior complaints she brought to their attention and felt that she needed to involve the city.

She provided numerous emails sent between her, her landlord and city code inspectors.

Asked why she continues to rent there, Kepford said that, if she moved, her complaints would be voided by the city and she didn’t want another renter to deal with what she’s had to. 

“They’ve been doing this to people for years,” Kepford said. “People that don’t understand, don’t look up what laws there are, have no money, they’re scared. There are people in this community who have kids. I don’t want them to move some other family into this place.” 

Aurora code enforcement confirmed that they have been looking into complaints about the unit since June. Complaints have also been filed regarding violations of exposed cables, unlawfully parked or licensed vehicles, excessive trash and debris, maintenance and work done without a permit, and a litany of other issues, predominantly filed by Kepford. 

One person who worked for Aurora Code Enforcement said there were “so many complaints” against the property that the city gave the owners “extra time” to remedy the situation before the property would be placed in abatement. 

A spokesperson for the city said, “Abatement, in this context, essentially means ordering cleanup. For violations such as tall weeds or accumulations of trash and debris, the city can hire a contractor to clean up the property and then bill the property owner for that work.” 

As a result of mold exposure, Kepford said that she has accumulated thousands of dollars in medical bills she says are linked to the mold exposure, but the exact amount is still to be determined, considering the ongoing nature of her medical state.

According to Kepford, she developed respiratory issues and rapid degradation of her teeth. Additionally, Kepford’s schedule has become increasingly dominated by doctor appointments. 

Kepford said that the owners of the property have retaliated against her for bringing this to the city’s code enforcement team. 

She has been served two eviction notices, the first after she reported a faulty HVAC and carbon monoxide detection system. The second came in late August after she went to code enforcement again regarding the mold issue. 

Kepford had needed some surgeries back in 2025 when she first reported the issues with the HVAC and carbon monoxide detection system, and says that she didn’t have the bandwidth to pursue a possible leak at the time. 

An email sent to Kepford by Westford Properties states: “We need your written authorization to do repairs in your unit during the ten days while you are in the apartment. You contacted the City regarding these work orders rather than submitting written work order requests through our office.”

Kepford said that she provided the company with written approval, but that they then did not provide maintenance because she had to be at an appointment. 

The email further requests that Kepford contact their office “before unnecessarily involving authorities.” 

Kepford further brought up issues of persistent crime in the area of varying levels. The Aurora Police Department confirmed that there have been numerous police responses to the M&M Mobile Home Park. 

One of the concerns Kepford raised was that one of the landlord’s maintenance employees was a man arrested in 2025 during a bar fight that ended with the man shooting others involved. 

The state of code enforcement in Aurora

Kepford is far from the first Aurora resident who has faced a landlord accused of being slow to act on providing adequate maintenance to their properties. 

The City of Aurora runs a code enforcement and apartment inspection programs, but the size of the offices has stayed roughly the same, even for the past several years as the city’s population increased. Some current and former Aurora officials and community members argue that chronic understaffing has allowed the issue of negligent landlords to blossom. 

Juan Marcano, a member of the Colorado Transportation Commission and former Aurora city councilmember for Ward IV, told the Sentinel that the city’s code enforcement has struggled for years due to chronic understaffing. 

“That’s something that long predates the current council, or even my time on the council, going back to the late 1990s, early 2000s,” Marcano said. “The City of Aurora used to have more code enforcement officers back then than they do today, despite our population growing pretty substantially over that time period.” 

Marcano expressed frustration that these issues plague the city and argued the issue has been overly politicized. 

“The externalities that we’re effectively allowing to persist and grow in the city by negligent landlords, we kind of had a culmination of that with the whole ‘Venezuelan gangs’ lie that (Mayor Mike) Coffman and (former Councilmember Danielle) Jurinsky helped spread a few years ago,” Marcano said, referring to a situation at the Nome Street apartments that drew national attention. Coffman later walked back his comments, pointing the finger at tenants and potential gangs. Marcano said he and his colleagues were invited to the complex by tenants to look into living conditions Aurorans were being subjected to more than a year before a scandal there erupted, eventually drawing a political rally to Aurora in October 2024. 

Coffman is a co-sponsor of the new measure to expand the current inspection and registration program to go beyond looking out for not just apartment complex residents, but renters of houses, condos and trailer homes.

In Marcano’s view, the slum conditions of some rental properties and lax code enforcement have only made the housing situation worse. 

“This is something that the city has, through understaffing the code enforcement division, allowed to fester,” Marcano continued. “A lot of the code enforcement actions, from time on council, unfortunately, were looking at people who had weeds in their front lawn that were too high… allowing multi-family developments to degrade to slum conditions.”

Marcano emphasized that this degradation was not necessarily the fault of the tenant either. 

“Property owners would not adequately provide trash service, adequate or any pest mitigation, or maintain structures whatsoever,” Marcano added.

Marcano said the council majority at the time refused to bring a vote to the dais on effective code enforcement, and that some conservative members capitalized on degrading conditions to “scapegoat Venezuelan migrants and immigrants more generally” when it became a national news story. 

Aurora settled a lawsuit with an out-of-state property management company that had allowed several of their apartment complexes to fall into disrepair. The issue garnered national media attention after Jurinsky claimed without evidence that parts of the city had been taken over by a Venezuelan gang, citing one of the apartment complexes as an example. 

In June, the city council passed a resolution directing the city manager to develop a potential registration program, which they hope will alleviate assessments for multi-family housing units.
Councilmember Alison Coombs hopes that the resolution will lead to better housing outcomes for Aurorans. 

Coombs said the first stage of the resolution has been meeting with stakeholders: tenants, landlords, housing advocates, and property managers alike. 

The coalition would then “schedule town halls so that [the community] is involved from the very beginning of the stakeholder process.”

Coombs added that the issue of landlord negligence, in particular from corporate property management companies, is a priority of the city council. 

“Even in initial discussions with staff, one of the items they want to see come out of this process is a designated local contact who can be reached to address code violations,” Coombs continued, stating a requirement they hoped to enact was that property managers have a point of contact to address code concerns. 

“Because in addition to places like [the ones] the former owners of the Edge of Lowry, some of the larger corporate entities have these completely unmanageable bureaucracies where you basically just get sent into a black hole of communications,” Coombs hopes that having a designated local contact will also property managers be better able to “respond to city communications” and to address issues related to code enforcement, licensing, and tax. 

Coombs added that the city council was exploring expanding staff in the code enforcement office, but that the council needed a better sense of how many new officers would be needed to provide adequate resources for the department. 

The pattern of rental properties falling into disrepair has also led to further community action. The East Colfax Community Collective has been working to rehabilitate roughly 60 units for people to live. The group has frequently intervened in rental complexes for the benefit of tenants in Denver and Aurora, officials said.

But for Kepford, she feels a moral obligation to make sure the issues the unit faces aren’t passed on to another prospective renter. 

“I’m fighting because I don’t want [the owners] to move one of my neighbors into this place,” Kepford said. 

Read more Week past: The week past in Aurora prep sports, 8.25-8.31.26

Read more Aurora prep sports schedule, 9.2.26

Read more Aurora prep sports scoreboard, 9.1.26