As they make their way through courts across the metro area, a recent crop of class-action lawsuits against area apartment landlords could change how they bill tenants.

The litigation has been made possible by tenant-friendly legislation from the Colorado General Assembly in the past five years, much of it championed by Rep. Steven Woodrow.

The Denver Democrat is a class-action attorney who files cases under laws he changes.

“I know that some see me as a legislator-litigator,” Woodrow said of his two overlapping careers and the criticisms he has heard. “Well, there are plenty of landlords under the dome who fight for landlords, and there are a couple of us trying to make life better for tenants.”

Legislator

“It’s a short bill in length,” Woodrow told his fellow members of the House Judiciary Committee, “with tremendous impact for one of Colorado’s largest constituencies: consumers.”

It was Feb. 8, 2022, and the panel was weighing House Bill 1071. Less than 200 words long, it would allow for greater awards in class-action cases brought under the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, in response to a 2012 court decision that curtailed such damages.

“You’re probably going to hear opponents say that the floodgates will open. This is a nonstarter,” Woodrow testified. “Again, we had class actions under the Consumer Protection Act for 40 years (before 2012) and Colorado was never a hotbed for frivolous lawsuits.”

The committee approved the bill, 7-4, sending it to the full House and Senate, which also passed it. The committee’s approval followed testimony from Zach Neumann, co-founder of the Eviction Defense Project, who predicted it would be a boon to Colorado renters.

“In a world where so much of Colorado housing is owned by large, out-of-state investors who have enormous sums of money, who own multiple buildings, this is the sort of provision that allows those tenants, those residents, to assert their rights,” he testified.

Litigator

Woodrow, who grew up in Michigan and began his law career in Chicago, where he went to college, is one-fourth of the firm Woodrow & Peluso, which has offices on Colorado Boulevard. The firm specializes in consumer litigation, appeals and small-business consulting.

In the past 13 months, Woodrow has co-filed at least seven class-action lawsuits on behalf of tenants that accuse property owners and their agents of violating the Consumer Protection Act. Those cases have, so far, survived attempts by landlords to have them dismissed.

“Tenants had been treated as an afterthought,” Woodrow said in an interview with BusinessDen. “These cases now signal a movement towards landlord accountability.”

Tenant class actions are increasingly taking aim at the charges that landlords bill: Late fees at the Turntable Studios near Empower Field, a $25 “valet trash fee” in Glendale, an “insufficient notice penalty” in Thornton, an application fee in Green Valley Ranch, an “administrative fee” in Lakewood, and unjustly pocketed security deposits in south Denver, among others.

Woodrow and his clients say the fees are unfairly high and not well-explained when tenants move in, a way of artificially raising rents. As he co-wrote in one lawsuit, such fees “operate like a hidden tax on tenants who have no choice but to pay” if they want to stay.

Hamrick, the lawyer for apartment associations, said any increase in operational costs for housing providers, including attorney fees, could “lead to a corresponding increase in rent.” And the threat of class actions may scare investors away from Colorado, stagnating apartment supplies.