Itap been a rough three years at 3600 S. Yosemite St. for attorney Lisa Guerra.
Last week, the parking garage at the Denver building collapsed, damaging several cars and forcing occupants of the building to evacuate. She, along with Guerra Law Firm’s staff of eight, haven’t been able to return since.
Guerra told BusinessDen she avoided the garage even before the collapse.
“The garage actually did scare me. … It was messy, it was dirty, it just doesn’t look like it was well maintained,” she said.
But Guerra’s issues with the building began in her first months there, long before the collapse. She said she could hear everything being said in the adjacent office, which was particularly concerning as an attorney, and she figured that the office could also hear everything she said. She moved across the floor, but the situation was the same.
Guerra said technicians have also been in the building weekly to repair a chronically broken elevator.
“I’m just riding out this lease,” she said.
The building’s owner, Miami, Florida-based SF Partners, has been ambiguous about when office workers can return to 3600 S. Yosemite St., Guerra said.
“We’re still in the process of gathering information so we have nothing to provide right now,” SF Partners Vice President Elliot Grub told BusinessDen a day after the collapse.
No one from the real estate investment firm responded to multiple requests for further details. The company bought the 10-story building, one block south of Hampden Avenue, in October 2019 for $13.4 million. It owns another office building in Colorado Springs and an office complex in Greenwood Village.
Alex Foster, a spokeswoman for Denver’s Community Planning and Development department, or CPD, said the city agency ordered SF Partners to obtain an emergency permit allowing temporary shoring and stabilization of the garage.
“The shoring under the permit will be inspected by a Colorado licensed structural engineer and a CPD building inspector, after which people may be allowed to retrieve vehicles. This will likely take a few days or more,” Foster said last week.
It will be the first permit that the building has pulled in nearly three years. Guerra said her first office on the fifth floor was fashioned out of a larger floor plate and the landlord then did similar work on the other side of the floor. No permits were filed for the work.
When Guerra questioned the construction, she never got a direct response from the landlord. She filed a building complaint with CPD, but Foster said a city inspector never found any issues.
Another tenant of the building, Jennifer Burgess, an administrative and financial assistant for Golden Spike Roofing, said SF Partners had also recently worked on the entrance of the garage. No permits exist for this work, either.
“There was leaking. It was crumbling in places on the beams, the cement beams that were going across,” Burgess said.
Burgess had been working the day of the collapse. She said she heard a loud boom around 3:30 p.m. Her 2017 Ford Escape was a casualty of the incident.
Like Guerra, she had her frustrations with the building, including her uncle getting stuck on four separate occasions in “that dang elevator.”
“They just don’t maintain that building very well,” Burgess said.
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