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NYC Bed Bug Seminar: did anyone get a letter inviting them?

nobugsonme — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:25:55 +0000

Jeremy, the BushwickBK.com blogger, got a letter inviting him to the March 12 bed bug seminar in Bushwick.

Anyone else get a direct invite to a NYC bed bug seminar in their neighborhood?

New York City to get bed bug awareness campaign

nobugsonme — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:08:25 +0000

Finally.

The Daily News reports that New York City is going to get a bed bug education campaign.

The article reports that there will be town hall meetings about bed bugs in Washington Heights (1/28), Astoria (2/5) and Bushwick (3/12).

Housing officials will roll out the campaign with a town hall meeting Jan. 28 in Washington Heights, where the creatures have rampaged through tenements, churches, bodegas, taxi garages and upscale co-ops overlooking the Hudson River.

Residents there have been under siege: The number of complaints has skyrocketed from 62 in 2005 to 366 last year, when 119 landlords were hit with violations.

More community forums will follow in two other neighborhoods with recent bedbug outbreaks: Astoria on Feb. 5, and Bushwick, Brooklyn, on March 12.

Tenants, homeowners and community leaders will be taught in English and Spanish how to identify bedbugs, exterminate them in a safe and low-cost manner and guard against future contaminations.

Just as important, they’ll be told what not to do, like spray an apartment, which can scatter the pests, or pour gasoline on mattresses, which poses a fire hazard.

This is all good, but I hope it will be just the start of a wider campaign to raise awareness. Television, billboard, newspaper, and bus shelter advertisements should be implemented to raise awareness, though there has been no suggestion this will happen. If the city wants to fight bed bugs, it is going to cost money, but not nearly as much as continuing to ignore the problem would have cost us in lost tourist income.

Awareness is just the start; as we’ve been saying for a long time, we need local government to track infestations. Someone needs to know where the bed bugs are and how widespread infestations are. Calls to 311 are just the tip of the iceberg. The city is still in denial about the true scope of the problem.

Another goal of the campaign: Alerting immigrants with limited English to watch out for unscrupulous merchants.

“Selling refurnished mattresses to Dominican immigrants who think they’re brand new - without telling them they’ve been reserviced - is a big business in my district,” said City Councilman Miguel Martinez (D-Washington Heights). “Unfortunately, many of those mattresses are crawling with bedbugs.”

This is important. The resale of mattresses should be banned. It should be illegal to pick up and resell any items marked as infested with bed bugs. And people need to learn to mark them as such.
Ultimately, though, the city is going to need to take a tougher line with landlords and tenants. Tenants must report bed bugs, landlords must treat them properly, PCOs must be contracted to come back until bed bugs are gone.

City inspectors should consider employing bed bug dogs to help them detect bed bugs, since visual inspections are time consuming and quick inspections often miss bed bugs.

Finally, financial assistance will be needed on several levels: homeowners and landlords may need assistance with proper treatment. And elderly, disabled, and other people will need physical and financial assistance with doing proper preparation for treatment.

I hope the city will institute a bed bug task force and staff it with entomologists who are true experts on bed bugs–and I hope these experts will be listened to and their suggestions followed. And soon.

This is no hero on a white horse, folks, but it is a start.

Check out the Daily News story here.

Update later in the day on 1/15:

Here’s a video from ABC7 Eyewitness News at 5 pm today. (Click on the number “2″ next to the bed bug photo, to see the video.)

It is not clear what the city is going to do, besides hold these meetings and work on the mattress resale issue. I guess we will know more tomorrow when the plan is officially unveiled.

The ABC7 video features Jeffery Eisenberg of Pest Away, and a Pest Away tech reporting that they use two chemicals in fighting bed bugs (Suspend and Gentrol).

The newscasters quipped to one another at the end,

“You said you’d get a new bed, right?”

“And you said you’d get a new house!”

Sorry ladies. It’s not that easy.

The strange case of bed bugs in Bushwick

nobugsonme — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:32:19 +0000

Welcome to Brooklyn

Originally uploaded by TheGirlsNY

Bushwick, Brooklyn is home to two large dueling loft buildings: 248 and 255 McKibben Street. Yes, that’s right: they’re buildings so hip, fun, and now, they have their own myspace pages. (Don’t laugh, but we have one too.)

Gawker did an article today about the buildings’ problems with bed bugs, though judging from the comments there and on myspace, only the residents of 248 are claiming to have a problem with bed bugs.

The Bed Bug Registry has complaints from thirteen different tenants about the building. (For its neighbor 255 McKibben, there are none.)

248 McKibben also has a whole blog running on myspace about the building’s alleged bed bug epidemic. It makes for interesting reading. The residents are correct that the entire building must be treated, if the infestation is as extensive as they claim it is. There’s a reluctancy on the part of some residents to call HPD (311) and file a housing complaint, for fear they won’t get references from their landlord in future.

Such concerns abound on our forums too. I have not heard from anyone who has filed an HPD report on a landlord and who has not been able to rent after that. I do know multiple people who have “pissed landlords off” by expecting to have pest problems, leaks, etc. fixed, and whose landlords were so happy to see such “troublemakers” move on that they gave the next landlord glowing reviews!

So I think the idea is kind of an urban myth. If it happens, though, surely the tenants could clip articles about how infested their building was, and show it to future real estate brokers as evidence that they had good reason to file an HPD report. Frankly, shouldn’t the real estate brokers recognize that if HPD agrees with the tenant that their building is infested (and files said report), then the tenant should not be blacklisted in this way?

Or are we all going to end up living with bed bugs because we’re afraid our landlords will not give us a good reference when we want to move to another building with different amenities and more bed bugs? Because if everyone is afraid to demand their landlords treat the problem, we’ll all have bed bugs soon.