Dorothy Trujillo’s life turned upside down when she received a letter last month asking her to leave the Autumn Arms Apartments, her home for the past 13 years. “We were in shock. Everybody has been stressed out,” said Trujillo, who occupies one of the complex’s 19 units at 1516 Perry St., just north of West Colfax Avenue. She and daughter Jerina, who is unemployed, have until the end of this month to move out. But vacant Denver apartments are hard to find, and those they have found are out of reach financially or geographically.

The pair paid $650 a month in a city where the average for a two-bedroom apartment topped $1,390 a month in February, according to Apartment List, a San Francisco real estate research company.

Tenants across the metro area are getting hit this year with rent increases running triple the national average. And a growing number of renters are finding themselves evicted so that landlords can renovate and make room for tenants able to afford a higher rent.

Complaints, legal and otherwise, from renters are on the rise, said April L. Jones, a Denver attorney with Colorado Affordable Legal Services who specializes in tenants’ rights.

“The biggest problem is that tenants aren’t aware of the law. They are shocked, and they can’t believe they only have 30 days to go,” she said.

While 30 days’ notice is standard, some month-to-month leases require only seven days, which is allowed under Colorado law, Jones said.

Low-income families are among those hit the hardest, especially those who live in popular areas such as northwest Denver, where gentrification is uprooting more and more people from formerly affordable neighborhoods.

The majority of the tenants at Autumn Arms are disabled, elderly or living on one income, said Maria Neal, an outreach-case coordinator with Denver Human Services.

Neal and Jones were at the apartment complex Monday, along with other DHS workers and local nonprofits, to help residents obtain social assistance, including access to a city program providing deposits and the first month’s rent.

“Some of these people are scared,” Neal said. “Some have been here for 15 years. Where do they start?”

The flip side of the Autumn Arms story is that the apartments, built in 1962, need a major upgrade, something tenants acknowledge.

Also, the property is next to the former St. Anthony Central Hospital — which is undergoing a major transformation that will bring in high-end apartments and condos — and is sandwiched between two of Denver’s hottest neighborhoods.

“The building is in pretty pathetic condition, with a lot of deferred maintenance,” said Zvi Rudawsky, one of the investors in St. Anthony’s Group LLC, which purchased the Autumn Arms for $1.4 million on Feb. 19.

The previous owner purchased it for $1.05 million in August 2012, according to Denver property records, but left the new owners a long list of items needing attention, Rudawsky said. Among them: stairs in poor condition, bug infestations throughout the building and leaky plumbing.

The new owners can’t keep rents in the $600 range and not lose money, Rudawsky said. After refurbishment, rents on one-bedroom apartments will run about $950 a month and closer to $1,200 on two-bedroom units.

“Unless you are subsidized by the government, you can’t financially make a deal work at those numbers given the prices,” Rudawsky said.

The new owners have invited current tenants to return once the renovations are completed, but that appears highly unlikely.

Trujillo, for example, doesn’t own a car and walks to work at a nearby nursing home, where she clears about $1,000 a month caring for the elderly. Already stretched, she said she needs to find something under $750 a month.

While the Autumn Arms owners took an everybody-out approach, a more common tactic among investors purchasing older buildings is to hit tenants with major rent increases on renewal.

“It is a quiet movement. They are not really evicting us,” said Heather Charlton, a resident of The Spartan Court in Capitol Hill. “But when you hear of a 50 percent rent increase, it is disconcerting.”

Charlton, a New York transplant, said she found a one-bedroom apartment at Spartan Court in the summer of 2013 for $575 a month, a rent that increased last summer to $615.

She could handle the increase, but she found it odd that her landlord didn’t want her to sign a 12-month lease, preferring to keep her month to month.

Rumors started circulating that the building would be sold, which eventually happened. The new owner required tenants to obtain tenant liability coverage of $1 million, which Charlton said costs her $22 a month.

Then her neighbors started to complain about rent increases on renewal that pushed their monthly payments from the $600s to the $900s. One by one, neighbors have started disappearing.

Simon Lofts, whose Hogarth Property Co. purchased Spartan Court in January, said increases simply bring rents there in line with the overall Denver market.

“If a property is currently rented at a level which is substantially below market rent, then one can reasonably expect a rent review, at renewal of tenancy, to appear to be substantial when it is brought into line with the market,” he said.

Regarding the insurance requirements, he said he implemented those after an insurer refused to pay for the damages caused about a year ago when a tenant in one of his buildings accidentally left the faucet on and flooded two lower units.

Charlton, 31, said the increases are more than she can afford and she has toyed with moving back to Rochester, N.Y., where rents are more affordable. But the trade-off would be fewer job opportunities.

Evictions used to be about the nonpayment of rent or being disruptive. Jones said she increasingly hears from renters who face eviction for requesting a repair or those getting pushed out by large rent increases.

In a more normal market, displaced tenants could find comparable units and comparable rents. But metro Denver’s housing market is anything but normal.

Population growth has outstripped the supply of housing across the northern Front Range, driving up rents and home prices across the board.

But the shortage is especially acute in central Denver, which has drawn a disproportionate share of young adults moving in from other states.

About 4 percent of rental units in Denver are affordable to households making 30 percent or less of the area median income, said Ismael Guerrero, executive director of the Denver Housing Authority.

Some estimates peg Denver’s shortfall of affordable-housing units at 26,000. And while apartment construction is approaching record levels, most of the units built skew to the high end.

Guerrero said a lack of new condos because of the state’s construction-defects law is partly to blame. Because renters have few options to buy, they are staying put longer, keeping upward pressure on rents.

“People are staying as renters longer,” he said.

A decade ago, the opposite thing was happening, with robust home sales keeping apartment vacancies elevated and capping rent increases.

Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration has made affordable housing part of its larger economic development plan, but the city has seen federal funding for affordable housing drop 15 to 20 percent from pre-recession levels.

At the same time, higher rents have pushed up the number of people needing help, even as the unemployment rate has fallen sharply.

Denver has about 6,800 federal housing-choice vouchers, also known as Section 8, available to assist low-income households bridge the affordability gap, and every fall, the city holds a lottery to award the 700 to 1,000 vouchers that become available, Guerrero said.

In September, 23,000 households signed up for the lottery of Section 8 vouchers available this year. In 2008, only 9,000 households signed up for the lottery.

Things are so tight that Denver is even allowing its residents to use its Section 8 vouchers out in the suburbs.

Susan Shepherd, the city councilwoman who represents the district that includes Autumn Arms, said she is doing everything in her power to help the residents being displaced, including buying more time from the new owners.

Tenants who can’t find a new place by the end of March may get another month, but work needs to start as soon as possible, Rudawsky said.

“We realize it’s not easy for anybody, but we have done everything by the book,” he said.

That part of West Colfax, effectively blighted the past 50 years, has suffered for years from high crime and unemployment, Shepherd said.

But one person’s blight is another’s affordability, and an angry constituent who lived nearby berated Shepherd on Monday for not doing enough to help those losing their apartments.

Jones said more creative thinking needs to take place about ways to keep rents in line with incomes and provide housing for the city’s low-income population. For example, she questions why the city didn’t buy Autumn Arms when it came up for sale.

“Somebody has to try to help these people, because once they are gone, they sort of vanish,” Jones said.

Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410, asvaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/aldosvaldi