This article from the Columbia Tribune explores what it takes for a public housing agency to fight bed bugs in a building designated for people with mental and/or physical disabilities.

The problem at Paquin Towers was first detected in March and has escalated since then, with 10% of the buildings 200 units already having been treated. At first, they were being treated one by one, but the CHA has discovered this is not enough where bed bugs are concerned.

Since [March], the housing authority has treated 20 units for the bugs, [Columbia Housing Authority CEO Phil Steinhaus] said. At first, the infestations were discovered and treated one by one, but the CHA now is treating six heavily infested units. Several features of Paquin Tower make the problem tough to tackle.

“What we do know, they are spreading through chases, or service-duct areas between apartments for wiring and plumbing,” Steinhaus said. “Air comes in under doorways, and there is ventilation in the ceilings of bathrooms. That’s how you get air exchange. We can’t go in and seal an apartment up or fog it or bug-bomb it.”

Unfortunately, treating the entire building is not an option. Steinhaus says it costs $2500 to treat one unit (which presumably involves assistance with prep, as well as fumigation of belongings in a truck, and pesticide spraying in the unit — all strategies mentioned in the article). This would amount to 1/2 a million dollars to treat the entire building.

Dealing with bed bug prep and treatment can be disorienting and upsetting for anyone, but for residents of Paquin Tower, these effects can be dangerously disruptive.

“With some of our folks, we have to be very sensitive about their routines,” Steinhaus said. “If they get something that throws their life into turmoil, it can be hard to get back to an even keel again.”

Charles Dudley, a Paquin resident for about 4½ years, said the small units that can resemble dorm rooms lend themselves to clutter. “In this building, there are residents with varying degrees of psychological disorders – hoarders, people with depression, anxiety – and they have accumulated a lot of stuff,” he said. “It’s important to them. How do you determine who should get rid of what? That’s going to be a hard issue to come across.”

Nevertheless residents are being told they must clean and de-clutter by December 17th, when inspections begin. Those who do not comply (with assistance if needed) will have their leases terminated.

Removing bed bugs from a high-rise, where bed bugs may be much more widespread than is already known, will be no easy task, especially given the challenges of the building’s design. The first step is knowledge, and it does sound like the management are aware of the difficulties of treatment, and prepared to support residents who need help.

It is also distressing to think that some residents with mental and/or physical disabilities may be evicted because they resist de-cluttering, prep, and treatment (even with assistance). It’s clear that requiring compliance is essential for the well-being of the rest of the residents, but I do hope support and counseling is being provided to resistant and non-compliant residents, so they can understand the importance of this, and avoid being evicted.

Thanks to Charles Dudley for pointing me to this article in a comment today. More from the Paquin Towers Residents’ blog.
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This Columbia Spectator article focuses on the personal plight of some folks with bed bugs living near Columbia University. It’s a nice article bound to raise some awareness of the problem. But what interests me is the section citing HPD statistics on bed bugs in NYC.

It cites the city’s HPD stats on bed bugs (which again, do not line up with those provided by other publications):

Seth Donlin, press secretary for New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said the city received 1,729 bedbug complaints and issued 437 violations to landlords in the last fiscal year. Community District 9, which stretches from 110th to 155th Streets, was “on the higher side,” Donlin said, receiving 216 complaints and issuing 53 violations.

The Daily News said in December, presumably of the same “last fiscal year” which ended last summer, that

In the fiscal year that ended in June, 6,889 infestation complaints were logged and 2,008 building owners were hit with summonses.

What’s with these numbers? Either the Daily News is wrong, or the Columbia Spectator is.

But even more interesting is the fact that, as the Spectator reports

Donlin added that renters with unresponsive landlords should calls the city’s non-emergency service line at 311 to “start a paper trail” in case the situation must be brought to court.

So a HPD representative actually spells out for a journalist the fact that people do not report their bed bug cases to HPD via 311 unless landlords are not responsive. It’s something you do if your landlord is ignoring your request for help, and then also if you are not afraid of alienating him/her for any reason (as filing a housing complaint might well do so).

Well, we sure knew that. And we know how very rarely people call 311, because we hear from people with bed bugs every day.

And yet every newspaper and their brother wants to tell everyone exactly how many bed bug cases NYC was hit with last year, and cites the 311 stats for evidence of how big or small the problem is.

I want to be clear that this is not a beef with the journalist at the Spectator, but a problem I am having with these HPD statistics (and the NYCHA statistics the Washington Post trotted out) and how well they mask the real numbers of bed bug sufferers in NYC. They make the problem seem quite small, and it is not.

The fact that the numbers are not consistent from article to article merely adds salt to my wounds.

But the real NYC bed bug story is that the city needs to start tracking infestations — and not via a housing complaint hotline — so we know exactly how many people are truly affected. My guess is if that happened, bed bugs would be a much bigger priority.Similar Posts:

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Ivy League gossip blog the IvyGate explained this week that the supposed scabies outbreak that forced everyone in the Pennypacker Harvard freshman dorm to be treated for scabies with a full-body pyrethrin cream application (not to mention making them all undergo the extensive laundering and calling-of-romantic-partners that condition requires), is now thought not to have been scabies at all. IvyGate shared a memo sent out to Pennypacker residents Wednesday which clarified the chain of events leading to the diagnosis and subsequent retraction:

Dear Pennypacker Resident:

After reading the Crimson opinion piece from October 22, 2007, “I’ve
Got an Itch”, it seems worthwhile to review where things stand after
the incidents of skin complaints two weekends ago at Pennypacker.

At that time, three individuals came to university health services
(UHS) with similar symptoms. After being evaluated by a physician at
After Hours Urgent Care, the possibility of scabies was considered.
Discussion with proctors at Pennypacker revealed that there were at
least 5 or 6 students at Pennypacker with itching skin and rash, though
only three of them wished to be examined.

Given the symptoms, also under consideration was the possibility of bed
bugs, though the skin findings were not classic for this diagnosis. A
scraping from the skin of one student was done to look for mites, but
these were not seen. It’s important to note the presence of mites on a
skin scraping absolutely confirms the diagnosis of scabies; if they are
absent, though, the diagnosis is not excluded. Frequently, the
diagnosis of scabies is difficult to make, and it takes several
examinations of a patient over time before other possibilities are
excluded. This is because the rash associated with scabies can be
fairly non-specific, and the “burrows” are often not seen.

But the three students’ rashes had cleared up within three days, leading an entomologist to speculate that scabies was not to blame:

Four days later, Dr. Michael Alpert, an entomologist from the Harvard School of
Public Health came to Pennypacker and talked to three symptomatic
individuals and concluded that scabies was unlikely, given the rapid
clearing. He speculated that the causative bug could have been
mosquitoes, though he never saw the bites when they were present. The
physician who did see the bites, said that the appearance of the bites
was not consistent with mosquitoes, and that their locations on the skin
was more consistent with scabies. As is frequently the case with rashes,
the simple symptoms can lead to a variety of diagnosis, and it
is often difficult to tell, in the absence of definitive testing, which
one is correct.

This memo above to students was from Doctors Sohayla Gharib and Gregory Johnson of the Harvard University Health Service, who also had this to say,

If the diagnosis was not scabies, it is
possible that there was another insect involved, though it does not
appear to be bedbugs (because there are no ongoing symptoms and there
was no evidence for bed bugs when the pest control team evaluated the
dormitory), nor appear to be mosquitoes. Whatever the ultimate source,
it is now eradicated from Pennypacker thanks to your response and
cooperation.

Let’s all hope that Pennypacker is itch-free for some time to come.

Get the full story from IvyGate.

Also, here’s a Columbia University gossip blog, BWOG (put out by writers from the student magazine) alleging bed bugs are in Schapiro 12 (student housing at Columbia University):

According to Bwog,

Now that a few students have been bitten severely, Housing has finally admitted that there are bedbugs. Two rooms have been fumigated, one of them twice. Unfortunately, Housing still refuses to clean the hallway and carpet even though bedbugs can easily travel from one room to another. Housing, you’ve really let yourself go on this one…

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