It’s done. With 2 days off of work at a time when I could least afford it and the weekend that followed, wiping out my 2nd favorite holiday of the year so that I didn’t even notice it had happened, and with the help of a friend who came through for me in a time of need like few people have, I have relocated nearly 2 decades of my life: 5 pick-up truck loads, rows and stacks of shelves, and 1 2.5 ton piece of vintage American iron are now in their new resting place in my suburban home north of the city. It was a tremendous effort fraught with rage, but as Johnny Rotten reminded us in P.I.L.’s 1986 single “Rise,” “ANGER IS AN ENERGY!”
Eighteen years. That’s how long I paid rent on a cinder-block garage off an alley in Denver—longer than the current duplex tenants have lived there, longer than the current owner has owned it, longer than the property management company has “managed” it. And yet here I am, erased by a clipboard.
What Actually Happened
This didn’t start as some neighbor vendetta about “my” garage. The case file reads like a parcel-wide cleanup: front-of-property shots, alley angles, weeds, general “conditions,” and then my garage folded into the same abatement rhythm. It’s a city-initiated sweep aimed at tidier optics and cleaner comps, not a bespoke investigation into my bay.
And once the machine spins up, the cure is brutally simple: remove the tenant who doesn’t fit the form. That tenant was me.
Denver’s zoning logic is geometry over reality: if you don’t live on the same block or the immediately adjacent block, a residential-lot garage cannot be rented to you as off-site storage. I live seven miles away. On paper, my eighteen-year tenancy never counted—which is very convenient for everyone who took my money while it did!
Naming Names: the Parties & Principals (for the record)
- Owner: Ryan Sullivan (inherited the property from James P. Sullivan. In my view, that’s the definition of inherited advantage in a city that keeps rewarding parcels over people)
- Property Management: Corken + Company Property Management — Clarissa Castor; Cameron Corken
- City: Denver Community Planning & Development — Zoning / Neighborhood Inspection Services
- Inspectors: Karena Fishler; Ana Gomez
- Case handling: two addresses on the same parcel; one case closed as duplicate and everything worked under the other; “tenant removal” recorded as “the cure.”
Sources: CORA files 2025-ZNIS-0011946 (issued 09/30/2025) and 2025-ZNIS-0011947 (duplicate); inspector notes 10/08/2025 and 10/17/2025; Denver CPD—Zoning/NIS
The 311 Black Box → No Accuser, No Accountability
Who complained? We don’t know. The complainant is anonymous or internal; either way, the mechanism rolls—photos, notices, “cure by removal”—with no one to face and no credibility to test.
In a criminal courtroom, the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to confront your accuser. In code-enforcement-land? No such right! A 311 complaint can be anonymous, and the government can still upend your life! That may be legal for administrative actions, but it’s the same move every time: efficiency over fairness. If you’re going to rearrange someone’s life, the least you can do is log a name—or demand corroboration strong enough to stand on its own.
My life gets rearranged by a voice with no face. That’s not justice; that’s a help desk with police powers!
18 Years vs. Everyone Else
I outlasted tenants. I outlasted management. I outlasted ownership. I kept paying, year after year, for a place that now conveniently “doesn’t exist” because it’s inconvenient for the brochure. That’s not “neutral process.” That’s gentrification with a clipboard: polish the spreadsheet, dress up the parcel, move the human problem offstage.
The Paperless Property Manager
What seals it for me is Corken + Company effectively admitting they had no record of my tenancy at the time—not from last year, not from five years ago, not from the beginning. When the City called, property management literally said they didn’t even know the garage was leased:
“Incoming call from property management today, She says she’s not aware of garage being rented out by third-party.” (10/08/2025 — CORA: 2025-ZNIS-0011946)
“She said that you were finally able to locate the third-party who is renting the garage, Management was not aware of the arrangement.” (10/17/2025 — CORA: 2025-ZNIS-0011946)
In my view, that isn’t a clerical hiccup; it’s grossly unprofessional for a licensed manager. It let them pretend I was a surprise to their own file and made it easier to treat me as disposable when the parcel needed to be “cured.” If you take over a property that has been paying rent for nearly two decades but can’t produce a lease, a ledger, or even a basic chronology, you’re not managing property—you’re managing deniability.
The file even memorializes my refusal to vanish for their convenience. On 10/22/2025, the inspector logged:
“Property manager called again, says they’re getting a lot of push-back from garage tenant (not living there just storing his belongings), says our notice is not a legal document. I told her to tell him it’s not addressed to him but to the owner…” (CORA: 2025-ZNIS-0011946)
Translation: I wouldn’t quietly grease the gears of their parcel tidy-up to bump someone else’s property values. I insisted on what the process actually requires—formal notice to the owner, not a suggestion that I should just disappear.
Eighteen years of rent—and when it counted, per the CORA notes, they had no file. Not a lease. Not a ledger. Not a timeline. Just a convenient blank space where I used to be. Good job, Corken + Company—consummate professionals!
What This Really Is
Let’s call it what it is: property values over lives. The logic isn’t safety; it’s optics and assessment math. “Compliance” here means erasing people—the quiet eviction of anyone who doesn’t align with the new lines, the new comps, the new “vision.”
I’m not asking you to weep for a guy and his ’56 Chevy. I’m showing you how the middle gets hollowed out: one clean-looking parcel at a time, one long-running arrangement abandoned as soon as the city takes a hard look and the numbers demand a shinier story.
The Only Thing I “Won”
Time. End of January 2026. That’s it. I got that by refusing to roll over on a 21-day “cure” to save the owner a fine. I’ll use every hour to triage nearly two decades of tools and memories. But don’t confuse that tiny concession with justice.
What Should Change (so this doesn’t steamroll the next person)
Owner accountability comes first. If a use cash-flowed for years, the City’s “cure” should land on the party who profited, not just the person easiest to erase.
Transparent complaint pathways. Anonymous tips can trigger a look, but opaque enforcement shouldn’t decide outcomes. Log the provenance and make it auditable.
Tenant-impact protocol. When the “cure” is “remove a human,” there should be a standard window and cost-mitigation steps—not ad-hoc mercy based on who yells loudest.
Shut A Final Door
I’ll survive. I always do. But don’t dress this up as fairness. This wasn’t about my behavior, my car, or my neighbors’ safety. It was about tidying a parcel to match the new money next door—and the fastest way to do that was to make me disappear.
As I described in my previous post about this, the neighborhood my garage was in was predominantly Black when I moved into it, and my next door neighbor was an O.G. Crip. The neighborhood is now predominantly White, and the block is filled with electric vehicles with bumper stickers with lefty platitudes on them. So here, dear readers, are the fruits of the labor of a city overrun and ruined by “tolerant liberals” using their money to displace the people who built neighborhoods once the property values get high enough for them to bother “investing” in them! These are the people with signs in their front yards reading “In this house, we believe…” while calling 311 to report their neighbors to the zoning board!
FUCK YOU, CITY & COUNTY of DENVER!
Fuck your politics, fuck your virtue signaling, and fuck your fucking spreadsheets! I’ve been here for 26 years, that garage was my space for 18 of those years! You took my money while the getting was good, then kicked me out when your property values mattered more to you than my rent!
How “PROGRESSIVE!”
“Think About The Future!”
I think this is the last straw: I’m done with Denver, I’m done with Colorado, I’m done once and for all with the cost, the corruption, and the hypocrisy of “blue cities” and “blue states.” After this indignation, I don’t think that even my job is enough to keep me here anymore. I’ll reserve a final decision for January of 2026, but by then, it is likely that I will decide to take my skills, my labor, and my tax money elsewhere… just as millions of other Americans are doing!
If that is the decision I come to, then that, dear readers, would effectively spell the end of Drag City Raceway, and by extension, this blog. We’re not done yet, though, so tune in from time to time for updates, because you know there won’t be a gruesome step of the process that goes unrecorded!
What happened to Halloween 1986/2025? What happened to the grand finale of Banzai Runner V and the Muscle Car Monster’s Ball? Well, they didn’t happen this year…whether they happen in the future remains to be seen!
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