Coding school that warned of closure again ordered to pay landlord $450K

The building at 1331 17th St. and Turing School founder and Executive Director Jeff Casimir. (BusinessDen illustration)

On Friday morning, Jeff Casimir took a brief break from planning an afternoon lecture at his Turing School of Software and Design to ruminate on a recent court decision.

“Throughout this whole adventure, there wasn’t a lot of surprise. The system doesn’t have a lot of forgiveness,” Casimir said with a short, knowing laugh. “When you’re asking for mercy, no one is incentivized to do that for you. So, it’s no surprise when you don’t get it.”

Two days before, a Denver judge ruled that the Turing School must pay $456,196 to its former landlord at 17th and Market downtown, upholding a prior decision of hers that Casimir had hoped against hope she would overturn. At a hearing before the decision, Casimir spoke of how the school had paid rent after initially moving out, until it no longer could.

“Tenant seeks sympathy and consideration in light of its continued payments despite its inability to use the space during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Judge Jill Dorancy wrote Feb. 26. “Tenant argues that the court may apply equity to either reduce or abate the remaining balance due under the lease term. The court finds no support in the law to apply such a policy.”

With that, she ordered the Turing School to pay back rent, along with attorney fees and interest. The total bill is likely north of $500,000, posing an existential threat to the school.

“We just don’t have assets that allow us to write a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it is ethically tough for me to take money that students have paid in tuition and use it to pay for an office that we don’t use,” Casimir said last week. “How do I tell somebody, ‘No, we don’t have a TA for your class, we had to take your money and pay for this old office?’”

Turing opened in 2014 at 15th and Blake before moving to the 12-story office building at 1331 17th St. It initially rented 17,500 square feet there but later expanded to 20,300. The building is owned by Los Angeles-based CIM Group, which paid $103 million for it in 2018.

Turing pivoted to online classes because of the pandemic but was under lease until 2024. It made rent payments into 2023, then got sued by CIM for the remainder. When it didn’t respond to the lawsuit, Dorancy awarded CIM the money. She affirmed that decision last week.

“With the lessons learned here, of having zero forgiveness or flexibility in a lease, how could a company like ours possibly rent space downtown again?” Casimir asks. “It’s a big gamble and I think what our case here shows is that it’s a big gamble that rests on the lessee.”

The school founder says that Turing has graduated 1,500 students in its 11 years, a legacy that cannot be erased even if the nonprofit goes away. Still, he is hoping to find a solution — fundraising, payment plans, something — that will allow it to keep teaching techies.

“If places like Turing can’t make it, there are fewer and fewer options for people to find economic freedom, and ultimately that is dangerous to the state,” Casimir warns.

“It has had a good run. The dream at the beginning was to build a school that could last for 100 years, so we’ve made it 11% of the way,” he explained. “We definitely are not going down without a fight, so there are more chapters to this story. This is not the end.”