If a landlord is renting a residential property to you in Colorado, the property must be a functional place for you to live under the warranty of habitability. This law protects tenants from abusive landlords who may try to cut corners on health and safety while collecting rent and putting you at risk.
In many cases, the terms of your lease agreement play a crucial role in enforcing your rights and holding your landlord accountable. That’s why working with experienced Colorado lease agreement attorneys can be essential to understand your contract and ensure your landlord meets their legal obligations.
If you are currently coping with unsafe or unsanitary living conditions, your landlord is violating your rights. You can stand up to them and make them fix the situation (while being compensated for your losses), and you don’t have to do it alone. Sue My Landlord has a long history of helping renters cope with inadequate living spaces to get justice, and our unsafe living conditions lawyers in Colorado can put that experience to work for you.
Don’t spend another day living in squalor when you can get your space cleaned up and make your landlord pay. Give us a call today at (720) 783-7368 to schedule a consultation and learn how we can put our legal experience and knowledge to work to help you get your home cleaned up for good.
What’s Considered Unsafe and Unsanitary Living Conditions in Colorado?
Many laws in Colorado establish minimum standards for living conditions, including both health and safety codes and warranty of habitability laws. These laws have changed dramatically in recent years with the passage of SB24-094 in 2024.
SB24-094 establishes specific definitions of the kinds of unsafe and unsanitary living conditions that breach Colorado’s warranty of habitability. If your unit has any of these issues, then your landlord could face legal liability as a result of the conditions at your rental unit.
For example, some of the specific kinds of problems in apartment rentals that are considered unsafe and unsanitary include:
- Not having adequate running water
- Plumbing issues that put you at risk of a backup or make showering or bathing difficult or impossible
- Mold and water damage that threatens your health and safety
- Pests such as vermin or insects
- Unclean common areas, such as common areas filled with garbage and debris
- Inadequate trash cans or dumpsters for trash pickup
These are just some of the many issues in a rental unit that could be considered unsanitary or unsafe and that could potentially create a rebuttable presumption that the landlord has violated landlord-tenant laws.
What Happens If Your Living Conditions Are Unsanitary?
If you are facing unsanitary living conditions, you should report the issue to your landlord immediately, and you should be certain to document it in case a dispute arises. If the problem persists, unsanitary living conditions may become health hazards if timely repairs aren’t made. In this case, turning to a Colorado health code violation lawyer can help you take legal action to enforce your rights and ensure your home meets basic health and safety standards.
Moreover, SB24-094 establishes strict timelines for your landlord to respond to your report and take action to make corrections. Depending on the issue, if the problem still has not been fixed between 7 to 14 days, this creates a rebuttable presumption that the landlord has failed in their obligations.
Landlords may also have to put you up in a hotel or in a comparable rental unit if your problem will take more than 24 hours to be fixed, and if you are out of your unit for 48 hours or more, you are entitled to a space with a kitchen or to a daily food allowance from your landlord.
However, it is up to you to pursue a remedy. While many tenants don’t even realize they can sue their landlord, the law says they can and gives them the protections they need to pursue justice if they are deprived of safe conditions.
How a Colorado Unsafe Living Conditions Attorney Can Help
If your living conditions are unsafe or unsanitary, an unsafe living conditions lawyer in Colorado can help you explore your options for pursuing a remedy. Depending on your situation, the type of conditions that you’re facing, and whether or not you want to remain in the property, your attorney may be able to help you:
- Take legal action against your landlord. This includes gathering the appropriate evidence and determining what legal arguments to make in court to prove that you should be compensated for unsafe living conditions. In some cases, you can not just make your landlord fix the problem, but can also get compensation for actual damages from the unsafe conditions as well as punitive damages if your landlord’s actions rose to a certain level of wrongfulness.
- Negotiate a resolution to your issues with your landlord outside of court. This option can be faster and less adversarial, but your landlord would need to be willing to be reasonable and would need to be willing to make sure your living conditions are corrected and that you are compensated for any damage
- Help you to understand your options, including making repairs and deducting the cost from the rent or breaking your lease and moving due to the unsafe conditions
- Defend yourself if your landlord is pursuing a claim against you for nonpayment of the rent or breaking the lease, even though you moved or withheld rent due to unsafe or unsanitary living conditions
- Protect your rights if your landlord has retaliated against you for fighting for safe living conditions, as landlord retaliation is against the law.
You should turn to Sue My Landlord to handle these issues for you, as our team of unsafe living conditions attorneys has decades of experience fighting against landlords who leave their tenants in these types of conditions. We know the law inside and out, and we have successfully helped thousands of tenants ensure they have a safe living space and are fairly compensated for damages done
Contact a Colorado Unsafe Living Conditions Lawyer Today
If your living conditions are unsafe, or if you were damaged by unsafe living conditions in the past, you should contact Sue My Landlord today. We have made it our mission to help tenants take their power back and ensure that their landlords follow the rules and stop putting them at risk.
Give us a call today to schedule your free consultation with an unsafe living conditions attorney in Colorado to learn more about the assistance and advocacy we can offer you as your landlord/tenant dispute is resolved.
