The official New York City data on how many people have bed bugs consists of two sets of numbers: calls to 311 (which are available to the public, sort of), and constituent complaint calls to city council members, which are currently shrouded in mystery.

311 posting NYC

Originally uploaded by Beauty Playin ‘Eh

According to NYC HPD data obtained by New York vs. Bed Bugs, there were 8,840 complaints and 2,757 violations in fiscal year 2008, as of June 19, 2008. (That means 8,840 people called 311, and of those whose homes were inspected, 2,757 cases were cited as bed bug violations.)

Still, those numbers, as alarming as they may be, are relatively low.

Homeowners never call 311 to report bed bugs. And most tenants don’t call 311 about bed bugs, unless their landlord is such a deadbeat that fuggeddabout calling a bed bug specialist, s/he won’t even call the building’s once-a-month roach-spray guy and have him do a little spray and pray.

And few people call their city council members about bed bugs, though I seriously think we all should, now that we know they’re actually keeping track of the calls.

I have often cited the incidence of New York City residents visiting the Bedbugger forums and complaining of bed bugs — compared with the extremely small number who tell us they called 311 to file a bed bug complaint — as anecdotal evidence of how much bigger the bed bug problem is in this city than the city’s limited data shows it to be.

And the anecdotal evidence keeps coming from elsewhere too.

Yesterday, Aly Walansky, of the SheKnows A Little Aly-tude blog, blogged about a string of bed bug infestations among her New York City friends and acquaintances:

. . . today I got an email from one of my closest friends…she is actually a friend I almost moved in with last year, and she recently moved to studio in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. Apparently, last night she discovered that her neighbors had bed bugs…and today, she discovered she did, as well.

Sadly, this isn’t even her first time dealing with them. Last year, she had a ferocious experience coping with said vermin at a boyfriend’s home. Matters were made worse when she escaped home to her parents, and discovered some had followed her there.

At the time though, we had chalked it up to the freaky Queens infestation crisis.

My friend persevered, spent a fortune on decor for her new home…and now is dealing with it again. She’s understandably hysterical.

But Aly’s story does not end there.

Not an hour later, I was telling my BFF what the morning’s events had uncovered, and she shared horrible news. (No, she does not have them.) However, one of her good friends does too! Then, I get to the office I am at today, and overhear another person chatting…you guessed it.

So Aly’s friend has had them twice, the friend’s neighbors have them, the friend’s boyfriend and parents had them the last time the friend was infested. Aly’s friend-of-another-friend also currently has them, as does someone at Aly’s workplace.

You might wonder if Aly has a fairly large social circle, but really, if New York has over 8 million residents, and only 2,757 people were known by HPD to have had bed bugs in FY2008 — why that’s about 0.003% of the population! The odds of a single individual knowing such a disproportionate number of bed bug sufferers are quite astronomical.

That is, if the HPD data comes anywhere near approaching the actual incidence of bed bug infestations in New York City.

I think it’s safe to say most people also don’t yet report their infested addresses on the Bed Bug Registry.

So, perusing the 311 stats yet again, I got to thinking: how many different people from New York City came to Bedbugger.com last month?

Without going into too much detail,* I’d estimate, based on Google Analytics data, that at least 9553 different New York City residents visited this site in the month spanning June 14th to July 14th. These are what Google calls “Absolute Unique Visitors,” not folks coming back again and again (as many readers in the throes of a bed bug infestation do).

I think it’s safe to say that many of these are just bed bug-curious. (May they remain only curious.)

Some may be having a bed bug scare. (May it remain just a scare.)

But I think it’s highly likely that a good chunk of the 9,553 are either in the throes of a full-on bed bug encounter, or have reason to think they have been exposed to bed bugs, or have seen an unidentified insect and/or felt unexplained itching or have apparent bite marks, and suspect these are bed bug bites.

I can’t make any claims as to what percentage of Bedbugger readers fall into the “bed bug-curious,” “having a scare,” “suspected or known bed bug exposure” or “full-on bed bug infestation” categories.

However, for what it’s worth, I do note that more NYC residents paid a visit to Bedbugger in the last 31 days than called 311 to report bed bugs in the entire fiscal year 2008 so far (as of June 19th).

They’re not here for the witty repartee, fashion advice, or gossip. Something is making them spend their precious leisure time reading about a blood-sucking insect.

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*Detail, for those who enjoy it: Google Analytics separates NYC into the four normal boroughs and then every “city” in Queens, making this hard to tot up, so I am counting only cities in Queens with more than 9 visitors. In other words, this is a very conservative estimate. I also don’t get data on unique site visits based on geography, so I’ve used the percentage of unique site visits for the site as a whole and adjusted the NYC visitors based on that.Similar Posts:

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David Segal’s article in the Washington Post was frustrating on many levels, but most of all because the actual data presented was erroneous and misleading.

Kudos are now due to Renee of NewYorkvsBedbugs.org, who was surely the party responsible for convincing the Washington Post via this campaign to correct the erroneous information used by David Segal to dismiss the size of New York’s bed bug problem.

If you recall, Segal argued that the media was overstating the size of the bed bug problem in the US. To support this, Segal claimed that,

. . . there are so many bedbug false alarms that there’s reason to assume many perfectly sane people are ringing them. In New York, the city housing authority has fielded and checked out more than 2,500 bedbug complaints in the past three years; fewer than 500 turned out to be actual infestations.

That information was, of course, entirely incorrect, as well as misleading.

The correction now preceding the article on the Washington Post’s site reads,

Correction to This Article
The article about bedbugs said that 500 of the 2,500 bedbug complaints lodged with the New York City Housing Authority between 2005 and 2007 turned out to be actual infestations. After taking a closer look at its records, the authority now says it did not keep detailed reports on bedbugs until last year. Of the 1,720 bedbug complaints received in 2007, a spokesman says, 70 percent resulted in treatment by an exterminator.

Nevertheless, my main complaint about the article still holds: the information cited in the correction is still misleading.

Segal only chose to cite NYCHA data in his article. The NYCHA only deals with infestations in public housing. As this NYCHA website reminds us, only 5.1% of the NYC population lives in NYCHA housing. Most tenants renting NYC apartments would not be eligible to call NYCHA to report a housing problem.

The vast majority of tenants in NYC would call the Housing and Preservation Department (HPD) via the city’s 311 hotline, to report that a landlord was not dealing with a bed bug complaint. I stress that they would only call 311 if (a) they lived in housing for which the landlord is reponsible for eliminating bed bugs (buildings of less than 3 units are one example of those which are apparently exempt), (b) they had tried to get the landlord to remedy the bed bug problem and it had not been dealt with, and (c) they were not afraid of any repercussions for reporting the landlord in this way. (In fact, my anecdotal information suggests that most tenants with bed bugs in NYC don’t call 311; it’s also a given that zero homeowners would be included in this data, since HPD would not help them; so the HPD data is a very low estimate of how many tenants in NYC have bed bugs in a given year.)

Still, as the Daily News correctly reported last year, in the fiscal year ending June 2007, there were 6889 complaints of bed bugs reported to HPD and 2008 summonses handed out to landlords as a result. Including this statistic along with the NYCHA data would lead to a fuller estimate of how many rental tenants had bed bugs in FY 2006-2007. It would be woefully understated, but not as much as the data the Washington Post provides.

The Washington Post was right to correct the inaccuracy of the NYCHA data Segal offered up, but this correction does not fully correct the inaccuracy of the facts presented in support of Segal’s argument.

New Yorkers should visit NewYorkvsBedBugs.org and write a letter to their city councilpersons.
Do it, and things might get better.Similar Posts:

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