This is what happens when local authorities cannot help low-income tenants get help and treatment for bed bugs. 

WLWT in Cincinnati reports that the Hillrise Apartments for Seniors in College Hill still has a serious bed bug problem. Cincinnati, you’ll remember, did not fund its Health Department’s bed bug inspection program in their last budget, and ceased doing bed bug inspections in January 2009.

The Cincinnati Health Department had to cease inspecting for bed bugs even though requests for assistance had gone from 70 requests in 2007 to 750 in 2008.

The residents at Hillrise Apartments appear to be living without proper bed bug treatment, claiming they’ve had bed bugs for years. In fact, we ran a story on Bedbugger about bed bugs in the Hillrise Apartments back in October 2007, when they were already said by tenants to have “spread from one end of the building to the other.” And that was over nineteen months ago!

The video linked below shows senior citizens attempting to ward off bed bug bites with 91% isopropyl alcohol (a contact killer if sprayed directly on a bed bug, this won’t prevent bed bugs from biting) or attempting keep them out of apartments with a towel stuck under the door.  The video shows bed bugs crawling and fecal traces in the corners of a room that must have had bed bugs for a very long time.

WLWT notes that many residents have sought medical help for the bed bug bites and

The problem is so bad that local hospitals have actually called the Health Department looking for help for Hillrise residents.

The Cincinnati Health Department says landlords are responsible for treating to get rid of bed bugs, but as as we noted above, the Health Department no longer sends inspectors to identify the problem and educate residents about treatment options:

The Health Department said it did have a program that would check for bed bugs and then educate residents on their options, but that program was cut months ago when the city slashed its budget.

Please go to Seniors Battle Bed Bugs At Infested Apartment Complex – WLWT Cincinnati to read the full story and watch the depressing video.

And think long and hard about what happens when local public officials have good ideas about fighting bed bugs, but no funding to implement them.

And before anyone asks, yes: I get that the economy stinks. However, it’s more expensive to treat bed bugs when an infestation is allowed to get very bad. And obviously, the longer it goes on, the more citizens will get bed bugs (increasing treatment costs exponentially).

We’re talking about a city in which a recent study found one in six people had had bed bugs. One in six, according to the Spring 2008 Greater Cincinnati Health Survey conducted by the University of Cincinnati Institute for Policy Research.

And that was in Spring 2008; I do expect that number to grow.

If infestations are allowed to go on for years, with insufficient or no bed bug treatment, not only do the residents suffer, but bed bugs also continue to spread to others and infest more people’s homes, causing more suffering, costing more money.

I wonder how many more people in Cincinnati and the surrounding area have bed bugs as a result of this particular infestation being allowed to go on for years. Similar Posts:

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WKYT in Kentucky reports that residents of low-income housing units run by the Public Housing Authority in Frankfort, Kentucky, have to pay for their own bed bug treatment, at a cost of $500-600.

This seems to be fairly unusual for public housing. And it is not a great idea. New Jersey residents are discussing whether New Jersey landlords should continue to be allowed to pass on the costs of bed bug treatment to tenants, a situation that may cause low-income tenants to hesitate in reporting bed bugs or getting treatment. They may simply be unable to pay. The same is surely true in Frankfort, especially among low-income tenants.

But Carole Anthony, the Housing Authority of Frankfort Executive Director, argues that public housing tenants should pay for bed bug treatment,

. . . since it is, in fact, their responsibility. They don’t move into an apartment that has bed bugs. They move into a clean apartment.

Whoa, Nellie! Once again, public officials are equating bed bugs with a lack of hygiene. This is an error.

Bed bugs are not attracted to unclean environments. If you bring bed bugs home, you will have bed bugs, whether you are living in a spotless, expensive home, or a dirty shack. (Clutter makes the problem worse, but certainly does not cause it.)

As one Frankfort housing authority tenant’s mother, Dene Jackson, says “they’re in low-income housing. How are they supposed to pay?”

And I suspect that some of the tenants do indeed “move into an apartment that has bed bugs.”

The housing authority’s protocol sounds extreme — everything is moved out of the apartments and tenants are kicked out for 72 hours. Tenants are told to remove all their stuff or have it thrown out. Carole Anthony suggests this is because some of the infestations have been quite severe; she tells WKYT they’ve opened refrigerators to find them full of bed bugs, and treatment has included replacing kitchen appliances.

Even if someone was not reacting to bed bug bites, surely they would have noticed such a severe infestation. If the housing authority is finding homes in such apparently advanced and obvious states of bed bug infestation, this tells me three things:

1) They need to be educating tenants about bed bugs and their signs,
2) They need to implement some routine bed bug inspections, and most importantly,
3) They seriously need to consider whether, perhaps, tenants are so concerned about the costs of treatment that they are not reporting the problem even when they recognize it.

If a person on a low-income is faced with a $500-600 bill, plus the cost of laundry, bagging, removing items, replacing them, and disappearing from the home for 72 hours, as well as the time and energy all of the preparations take, we have to acknowledge this is a serious disincentive towards taking action.

The article reports, “The housing authority says it will make payment plans available.” But this is hardly enough. Even spread over a year, it might cost tenants $50 a month that they simply do not have.

If I lived in Frankfort, Kentucky, I would consider the fact that as long as the public housing authority is making it hard for low-income tenants to get help with their bed bug problems, bed bugs will continue to spread quickly in Frankfort.

More and more people will discover that bed bugs do not discriminate, and are not caused by not living in a “clean” home. And they’ll discover how exhausting and expensive this problem really is.

And maybe they’ll come to realize that if anyone in your town has a bed bug problem, you have a bed bug problem too.

Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs in Grand Forks, North Dakota public housing
• Claridge Towers residents get help with their bed bugs from DC Housing Authority
• Building with bed bugs hosts polling station this week
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• Bed bugs bite in Richmond, California public housing development

Many local laws make it easier for bed bugs to spread, and New Jersey’s laws are among them.

As noted on our FAQ about who pays for treatment, the New Jersey Warranty of Habitability says landlords have to keep rental apartments pest-free.

However, things can be a bit more complicated than that.

Although the law says NJ landlords have to pay to eliminate bed bugs from rental units, they don’t say landlords can’t then turn around and charge tenants to cover the costs.

This Journal article details an example of this in action: seniors living in low-income housing, the 240-unit Grandview Terrace in Jersey City, are suffering badly from bed bugs, and have been for three years. Fifty units are now known to have them:

The state holds landlords responsible for extermination in “multi-unit” buildings of three or more apartments – if the bugs are found in two or more units or in common areas. But the state doesn’t take a stance as to whether landlord can then turn around and charge the tenants, said Jennifer Monaghan of the state Department of Community Affairs.

One-and two-family buildings are regulated by a different set of laws that can be superseded by municipal law, but in general the rules are the same: the owner is responsible, but has the right to include a provision in the lease charging the costs back to the tenants.

But despite the law most Jersey City landlords are shouldering the costs, said Charles Odei, director for Jersey City’s Division of Tenant Landlord Relations. “With all the other cases (but Grandview Terrace) we’ve been successful in getting the landlord to pay so far,” he said.

The 284-unit Grandview Terrace has had nearly 50 cases of bedbugs in the past three years, said Steve Lesko, president of Norman Ostrow Inc., which manages the building. He said the building’s tenant board voted in 2006 to charge tenants individually.

“Why should people who don’t have a problem pay for people who do?” he said, adding that the policy tends to prevent false alarms.

That kind of policy, decided by a tenant board or not, just shows an ignorance of bed bugs and how they work. They probably made this decision ignorant of the fact that a large percentage of people do not react to bed bug bites, and so have to have a pretty serious infestation before they notice it. They must also have been ignorant about just how easily bed bugs travel within a building.

And clearly, Grandview Terrace’s management is ignorant about how bed bugs travel:

Lesko said most infestations at Grandview come from tenants bringing the bugs into the building through used furniture or their clothes, not from the bugs moving from one apartment to another.

But tenants disagree, saying they’ve seen the bugs in common areas, and that the critters can easily jump from one tenant to another in elevators.

And charging tenants individually has the down side that many won’t report the problem, causing the infestation to continue to spread.

“Everyone that lives in Grandview Terrace is on a fixed income,” said Robert High, who has tried to deal with the bugs on his own. “We can’t afford it.”

Bed bugs don’t jump, but they do walk, and run.

I am not sure how the building management determined that those 50 cases were mostly caused by bed bugs being brought in from outside.

(Perhaps Lesko has little tracking devices planted on them?)

But I do know this: forcing elderly people on limited incomes to pay for their own bed bug treatment is a good way to ensure the entire building is eventually infested. And that’s not good for owners or tenants.

New Jersey needs to update its housing laws. If tenants are going to be forced to pay for bed bug treatment, then there must be a provision of financial assistance to help them do so. And of course, if landlords are suffering hardship, the government can certainly pass laws to help them pay for treatment too. But skipping or skimping on bed bug treatment is not a good idea.

People need to be encouraged to report bed bug problems, and they need immediate treatment, regardless of ability to pay. It’s in everyone’s best interest that everyone gets good, swift treatment for bed bugs.

Update:

This article, also from the Journal, reports on how seniors in a Bayonne Housing Authority building, Back Bay Gardens, at 535 Avenue A, are suffering with bed bugs, despite treatment.

One tenant there had 10-12 PCO treatments, and has now been free of bed bug bites for three weeks (much too soon to declare victory).

The problem there seems to be that tenants are only treated if they complain about bed bugs — there do not seem to be any routine inspections going on. And when they are treated, the article implies there is a one-month gap between treatments and follow-ups only occur if tenants ask for them:

[John Mahon of the Bayonne Housing Authority] said the Housing Authority provides an extermination service once a month and sends the exterminator when a tenant calls with a problem.

A tenant who had treatment several weeks ago reports continuing to see bed bugs. Why aren’t all the units in this building being inspected, and why aren’t treatments recurring at approximately 2-week intervals, which most PCOs who know bed bugs seem to recommend? Almost no one gets rid of bed bugs after one treatment, since traditional treatments do not kill bed bug eggs, which hatch in approximately 10 days.

This article is disturbing, and a good reminder that simply providing bed bug treatment to residents is not enough; buildings and housing authorities need good bed bug treatment protocols; they need to provide aggressive treatment with follow-ups, and to inspect units adjoining those with infestations even when tenants have not yet detected a bed bug problem.

More on bed bugs in Grandview Terrace, and on the spread of bed bugs in Hoboken, Atlantic City, and the rest of the Garden State here.
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Canada’s CTV reports that a BC Housing complex is infested with bed bugs. The article mentions Kuehn Tower, but the BC Housing site lists Ted Kuhn Tower I and II in Surrey, so this appears to be a typo. (Incidentally, I wonder if they found a new manager yet?)

Bill McLeod’s body is covered with bites. It’s bedbugs — and they’re crawling all over his apartment building.His home — in a B.C. Housing complex in Surrey — has been sprayed nine times to deal with a stubborn bedbug infestation. But the pests aren’t going anywhere.”I can’t sleep like this,” McLeod told CTV News. “I’m up until three in the morning. I have to leave all my lights on.

The article later claims,

B.C. Housing says it’s spent tens of thousands of dollars on pest control companies, and has a rigorous and comprehensive plan to eradicate the pests.And it’s a major problem for people in low-income housing who may have other barriers such as mental illness that make it harder for them to deal with the problems.

Mr. McLeod’s home has been treated for bed bugs nine times. Something must be going wrong then, eh? Nobody should be forced to live with this problem. Especially not folks who are older, disabled, or with other health concerns. If residents need help with prep or otherwise need support during treatment, then either social services, or BC Housing, will need to provide this assistance.Similar Posts:

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The article from Joe Fiorito yesterday (and my post on that article) mentioned an initiative being tried out at Seaton House, a City of Toronto-run shelter for men that has been operating since 1959. Men who live in the shelter are being given paid training as “pesticide technicians.” They’re being paid a good wage ($12-15/hour) while they study and work.

It’s worth noting that Wikipedia claims Seaton House is the largest homeless shelter in Toronto, housing at times as many as 700 men.

I found more information on this initiative in this PDF at the City of Toronto website. (”Bug and Scrub” is item #2.) They even have a great name, though if they are only dealing with bed bugs–and this is not clear from the description–they might have gone with “Bed Bug and Scrub” to make this clearer.

It sounds like the program provides full-service assistance with bed bugs (from detection, to cleaning and prep for treatment, pesticide application, and follow-ups):

Bug and Scrub is an all in one service that incorporates responsible and reliable measures to deal with the bed bug issue. Following an Integrated Pest Management protocol, full treatment is provided including assessment, prep work, spraying of the bed bugs, removal of belongings and follow up. The business has already proven successful and has provided many low-income, vulnerable individuals with this unique service.

Staff at Seaton House support clients during their training and employment phase. Anyone residing in the City of Toronto can receive the Bug and Scrub service. Fees operate on a sliding scale and can range from $250 -$800 based on the type of work required.

For more information please contact Richard Grotsch at 416-392-5572.

Remember, contrary to some misconceptions, IPM doesn’t mean no pesticides are used. It means fighting bed bugs on multiple fronts, trying to remove them as much as you can, and then treating to kill what’s left.

I have to say, the Bug and Scrub concept excites me: these men are getting training in what is unfortunately a growth field, they’re getting support as they make an educational/career transition, and Toronto residents are hopefully getting good, reasonably-priced pest control service.Similar Posts:

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Three weeks ago, building management of Bowling Green Towers — a low-income housing building in Bowling Green, Kentucky that houses elderly and disabled tenants whose rent is subsidized by the government (via HUD) — claimed the building had only “four” units infested with bed bugs. You can read an earlier story we did on this here.

Apparently there was at least one professional bed bug treatment a few weeks ago. But bed bugs have now apparently spread more widely.

According to this article from WBKO News on Thursday, one man thinks they started in his unit (though it would be interesting to know how he knows; people are often wrong about this):

“The bed bugs started in my apartment and was not dealt with right away and the bed bugs started migrating to other apartments on that side,” explains Bowling Green Towers Residents’ Association Vice President John Baize.

“From what I know, it’s on five different floors now,” adds Bowling Green Towers Residents’ Association President Debbie Bell. “I believe it started on the A tower and it spread four floors on that tower and then spread to B tower on one of the floors.”

I don’t know how many units are known to be infested today — it’s now three weeks after the first treatment — but Debbie Bell, President of the building’s Residents’ Association, told WBKO news (in a second article on Friday) that “five floors” are now infested and that every unit on those five floors is to be treated:

“With the bedbug issue, we are having exterminators come out on a regular basis, and they will be spraying all the apartments, all the affected floors,” Bell explains.

I hope they also pest control operators professionally inspect the floors above and below those five affected ones.

Apparently, the tenants’ group met with Kentucky Housing Corporation, which runs the building, between the times the two articles appeared on Thursday and Friday, according to these two sources.

No matter how many units on those five floors are now known to be infested with bed bugs, this seems like good progress, and a reminder that tenant organizing can go a long way towards getting real help from landlords.

The reporters said traditional methods did not work, but I suspect that what appears to have not worked in this case was that (a) spraying must be done repeatedly at approximately 2 week intervals until all bed bugs are gone, and (b) all affected units must be treated (and this requires all units adjacent to, above, or below affected units to be professionally inspected, in every bed bug case).

Thursday’s story also has associated video content. Similar Posts:

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More on the Nashua rooming-house mentioned in this story.

Richard Jebb of Nashua, New Hampshire, is suing his rooming-house, having had nine treatments in his room and still suffering from bed bugs, according to the Nashua Telegraph.

 On Tuesday, Jebb took his bug problem to Nashua District Court, suing his landlord, Mark Flint, and the owners of the building, 23-25 Temple Street Realty LLC, for interrupting the “quiet enjoyment” of his property by not eradicating the problem in a timely fashion.

The company faces a $1,000 a day penalty for every day of the violation, about $240,000 if it is proven the company was in violation of the law in June.

Sixteen units inspected showed signs of bed bugs earlier this month.

The bugs only come out at night, he said, remarking that tenants in the building talk about seeing the bugs on their television screens late at night, something he said he recently experienced.

It’s not uncommon, especially in SROs, rooming houses, and other low-income housing, that tenants are afraid to (or don’t know how to) demand help with the problem.

Although many tenants in the building are suffering with the problem, Jebb said not all of them are willing to speak up about it.

Thank goodness Jebb was willing to go to bat:

It is partly for the “little guy” that Jebb said he decided to put his rent money in escrow and fight the issue in court.

“If that’s what it takes to get this building under control for all these people.”

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Jim Gaines Reports for the Bowling Green Daily News (Bowling Green, Kentucky) that

A few of the roughly 200 residents in Bowling Green Towers at 1149 College St. have had restless nights due to a pesky problem. Several apartment-dwellers have reported an infestation of bedbugs – but health officials say trouble is being squashed before it spreads.

Barry Turner of the Barren River District Health Department said his office has gotten a few recent calls from Towers residents, so he called property manager Jennifer Mitchell, who gave him the impression that it wasn’t widespread. She told him managers were dealing with it and had contacted an exterminator, Turner said.

“We haven’t dispatched anybody over there, and probably don’t plan to,” he said.

(Well, as long as they said they were dealing with it.)

This is another situation of bed bugs spreading in housing for the elderly and disabled. Remember Halcyon House in Denver? The Hillrise Apartment Building in Cincinnati? Warren Towers in Moline, Illinois? The Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington, DC?

Like Halcyon House, Bowling Green Towers is privately-owned and subsidized by HUD:

The towers are privately owned by Germantown, Tenn.-based TESCO Properties, but rents for the elderly and disabled residents are subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD exercises some oversight through that financial relationship.

Since the property manager has told the health department that the problem is not widespread, we might ask how this was determined.

A spokesperson for HUD’s Louisville office said the agency contacted the Towers’ management Friday after learning of the problem from media inquiries. Building managers said the infestation was limited to four units, the HUD spokesperson said. HUD was told that an exterminator had been called and that employees were inspecting all the apartments one at a time, looking for any more problems.

It is not clear to me whether this means that employees of the Towers, or employees of the exterminator hired by the Towers, were doing these inspections, but it does sound like the former. If this is true, it is worrisome. We’re told by pest control operators how difficult visual inspections of properties for bed bugs can be, even for experienced PCOs. Employees of the building are very unlikely to be trained to spot all but the most advanced infestations.

A bit of sleuthing would not go amiss. Are the infested units physically connected (next door, above one another)? If the four infested units are all attached, then perhaps they and other adjacent units could be treated, and that may be it.

If the four units are not attached, then further investigation is worthwhile. I would then investigate whether there were any connections between these that can be traced. Are the residents with infestations friends who visit one another? Does a particular staff member assist those residents? Do they go for weekly outings using a particular car service?

That may all seem like an exhausting process. What I would not do, however, is assume that four non-attached units just happened to become infested with bed bugs simultaneously (if this appears to be the case). Bed bugs spread, and it is likely such cases would be related.

In any case, it is likely others have bed bugs too, but do not notice. (If they do not react to bed bug bites, they can have bed bugs and not know it.) It would be worth trying to trace a trail of some kind between the infested units, and trying to figure out what other units may have been exposed.

Detecting bed bugs can be really tricky for anyone, and elderly and disabled people can be at a disadvantage in many cases, due to sight and mobility limitations. They need all the help they can get to avoid having to suffer from this problem.

Let’s hope the Bowling Green Towers and the Barren River District Health Department take this seriously–clearing it up quickly and avoiding further infestations.Similar Posts:

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Cincinnati held a meeting yesterday about bed bugs. Channel 9 (ABC) said yesterday:

The Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority will show the Health, Environment and Education Committee a presentation on the pests.

Officials said bed bugs are a big problem in the city’s public housing, which is overseen by the Housing Authority.

According to Channel 12, Cincinnati politicians are claiming some success against bed bugs:

The health department says it received 737 bedbug complaints last year, more than 300 in September and October alone. Since then, the numbers have gone down.

Dale Grigsby, Cincinnati Health Department: “It appears as though at least what we’ve been doing for the last 6 months has been effective, but I don’t want to say conclusively until we’ve seen some more data.”

The message not to re-use discarded mattresses and couches may be sinking in. But housing advocates say the bedbug problem is here to stay for at least a while longer.

Surely the work Cincinnati is doing is having an effect.

However, I would not use statistics based on complaints during the last two months as a barometer. It’s my sense that people taking action on their bed bug issues goes down between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. My sense is that people are celebrating and preparing to celebrate. Money and time are going to other things, and they do not want to deal with problems–especially one they may think they can deal with a bit later. I don’t think that –based on fewer calls to the city about bed bugs in November and December–one can declare any improvement just yet. It really is premature.

And a few months isn’t really long enough to assume those treated homes are really bed bug-free. Bed bugs are notoriously tenacious. Even though Cincinnati was helping people discard furniture carefully, and providing information, there is no reason to think existing bed bug cases have been abated and that they have not spread further. It can take months for people who were treated to realize their bed bugs are not actually gone, yet. Rick Cooper helpfully suggests that people wait 55 days after last seeing a bed bug or suffering a bite to declare themselves bed bug free. My own sense is that in a multi-unit building with multiple infestations–and especially possibly undiagnosed and untreated ones–you aren’t really sure the problem is gone for some time after that.

The article also contained a strange estimate of how many would suffer bed bugs:

Charles Tassell, Greater Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Apartment Association: “It’s going to be one in seven houses by the year 2008 that will be infected. We’re at 2008 and we’re not at that number yet, but we’re going to see it continue to grow.”

On the video, Tassell attributes his estimate that 1 in 7 houses would have bed bugs by 2008 to unnamed “professionals”. I do not recall hearing this statistic before, and I don’t know if it refers to Cincinnati alone or some larger region. I Also assume Tassell means “homes” in particular, and “homes,” not houses. Perhaps a reader will know the source of this statistic.

The Local 12 article did not give any real basis for thinking things were either that bad, or that improved. We can consider the one actual case mentioned in the article:

Joyce Jones has the bites to prove it. When bedbugs showed up in her apartment last fall she asked for help.

Joyce Jones, Stanley Rowe Apartments: “I did everything…I called in a work order. They come in and I tell you what they do. They do this here and say we don’t see nothing.”

Joyce is one of many residents of Stanley Rowe Apartments that are fighting bedbugs. Because of complaints, city council demanded answers from the Metropolitan Housing Authority and health department. CMHA says it’s doing the best it can. The health department says bedbug education programs seem to making headway.

Reading this tells you little. Watch the video. It’s hard to tell exactly what Joyce Jones’s housing inspector did, but her implication is that the inspection was cursory and this is a familiar story to our readers. Some readers tell us they have PCOs, and in some cases housing inspectors, who do very limited “inspections.” While we know bed bugs can live in the baseboards or other places in the room, and in furniture besides beds, some inspections still don’t go beyond looking under the sheets and mattress, and if they do not find a live bed bug, the inspection is over. (Some PCOs and inspectors, readers tell us, don’t inspect at all.) There have been isolated reports from people in NYC of HPD inspectors unwilling to come into apartments after people filed bed bug complaints. Of course, that is clearly not HPD policy and any person making this accusation simply must pursue the matter further with HPD.

Local 12 says Jones is simply using extra bleach in the laundry until someone comes to help. Since Jones lives in the same bed bug-beleaguered high-rise senior apartment building as Samuel Blackmon, the man shown in this harrowing video, where his “apartment that was treated a month ago” was not surprisingly still literally crawling with bed bugs. (The full story was not clear, but that video implied Blackmon’s apartment may have been treated just once, as of October, and that a month had elapsed with nothing more being done.) I would hope inspections in every unit of the building would be very extensive indeed, and that treatments are much more aggressive and regular.

I appreciate the steps Cincinnati has taken, but I would guess they still have a long way to go in fighting bed bugs.  We have not heard anything about monetary assistance for tenants, landlords, and homeowners who need help both preparing for treatment and for covering costs of treatments themselves. 

I hope they will add such assistance to current programs of public education and refuse removal, and make sure everyone is getting proper, thorough inspections and treatment–until their bed bugs are truly gone.

View the brief Channel 9 article by Alyssa Bunn here.

View Local 12’s article here.Similar Posts:

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The lead story in the “News” section of today’s New York Daily News is on bed bugs. That’s good: it’s always good to see bed bugs in the news.

It’s not a particularly helpful story, however.

For starters, there are inaccuracies. Let’s start with this caption below a photo of an adult bed bug:

Unfed bugs are 1/4 to 3/4 inch long. They are brown or red-brown in color…

No!

They are never 3/4 inches long. Bed bugs, fed or unfed, range from 1/32 to 1/6 inch long. After hatching from the egg, they have 5 nymphal stages and one adult stage. Unfed bed bug nymphs (first instars that have never eaten) are clear in color. Fed bed bugs can be anywhere from red to rust to brown in color.

(Editor’s note, the error was made less egregious: by late Sunday night, it said “Unfed bugs are 1/4 to 3/8 inch long.” This is still inaccurate, however.)

This matters because people considering whether they might have bed bugs need to know the correct size, and that unfed nymphs are translucent, not red or brown.

Also, the “do’s and don’ts” suggests people “bag books, papers, most loose objects, and contents of closets so exterminators have access to all cracks and crevices in the home.”

This is not good advice in and of itself. If you bag up everything in your home, or discard it (for that matter), before a Pest Control Operator (PCO) has inspected and verified the presence of bed bugs, then it may be very difficult for them to diagnose your problem. You may end up with all your stuff in bags and PCOs telling you you don’t have bed bugs. And they may be wrong.

What’s more, simply bagging stuff that contains bed bugs or their eggs means you have bags full of bed bugs. What are you going to do with that, now?

Your PCO may advice you to carefully inspect and clean and bag items, for a time during treatment. Make sure you do so only after the problem has been identified by the PCO, and after the PCO has told you when you will be removing stuff from those bags. The answers on that seem to vary. Reading this FAQ might help you be prepared to discuss the issue with your PCO.

One interesting tidbit was an update of the previous data from HPD on bed bug complaints and violations.

The numbers are off the charts: In 2004, New Yorkers placed 537 calls to 311 about bedbugs in their homes; the city slapped 82 landlords with bedbug violations, data show.

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

They must get rid of the pests within 30 days or face possible action in Housing Court, the city Department of Housing, Preservation & Development says.

This would be for fiscal year July 2006-June 2007. You’ll recall that approximately 1/3 fewer complaints were logged by 311 the prior fiscal year, and less than half as many were declared actual bed bug cases.

But these numbers are misleading because they only represent cases where those with bed bugs were tenants in city apartments and called 311 to report their bed bugs. As I have been saying for more than a year, most people do not do this. Out of a hundred tenants in NYC with bed bugs, I’d be surprised if more than one or two called 311. Most people don’t even realize this is an option–they know from past experience that pest complaints are directed at landlords. Moreover, those who do know, more often than not, choose not to call, because they’d rather work through the landlord if possible, rather than file a housing complaint and risk alientating the landlord. (This is often the last resort.)

The numbers are also misleading because they don’t include public housing, which logged, “1,708 verified bedbug cases in 277 public housing projects this year, the city Housing Authority says.”

The numbers also do not include statistics for those who own co-operative apartments, condos, or other housing.

The statistics offered on bed bugs in the schools (50 schools suffered a total of 74 bed bug “cases”) don’t line up with data the same newspaper shared back in February 2007, when the same newspaper reported that 43 schools had identified a total of 95 live bed bugs. (The story is gone, so you will have to read about it here.) Though it’s interesting to know that only an additional 7 schools have discovered bed bugs in the last ten months, it seems they must be defining “bed bug case” differently now than then, to have gone from 95 “bugs” to 74 “cases”.

Any statistics from the schools are skewered, however, since teachers have to see, catch, and mail away a bed bug for verification before the presence of a bed bug in the classroom will be registered. And while this may seem reasonable, anyone here will tell you you can be bitten badly and for a very long time before you ever see one. A lone teacher in a busy NYC classroom has slim chance of finding a bed bug on a student. Shall we assume, then, there are more?

Perhaps the most intriguing story in the article was that of Bernard Spitzer’s apartment building. We’re told,

[Bed bugs] even contaminated five or six apartments in the swanky rental tower at 220 E. 72nd St. owned by Bernard Spitzer, the governor’s 83-year-old father.

Several tenants described a persistent, if intermittent, infestation on the 15th, 16th and 17th floors.

A few infested floors, midway up a high-rise: nothing unusual there. But wait:

Spitzer’s 28-story building sits atop the six-story home of Marymount Manhattan College, which discovered seven infestations in two residence halls. The problem was under control by October, a spokeswoman said.

Marymount Manhattan has three residences for students, none of which are in this building. It does cause one to wonder whether there is any connection between the incidents on the 15th-17th floors and in the homes of some of those who spend part of their time in the first six floors.

We also get an update on the city’s “response” to bed bugs:

City officials say HPD inspectors are increasing enforcement as complaints mushroom and the Health Department is handling education and prevention efforts. It’s not more actively involved because its focus is on disease-spreading pests, officials said.

“That’s not good enough,” said City Councilman Gale Brewer (D-upper West Side.) “It’s great that we’re not smoking as much, and great that we’re not eating trans fats, but we need to focus on bedbugs in the same aggressive manner.”

Brewer wants to create a Bedbug Task Force and bar the sale of reconditioned mattresses, which the Bloomberg administration opposes because it “would adversely impact lower-income New Yorkers,” a mayoral spokesman said.

I love Brewer’s comments about smoking and trans fats, both of which are banned from local restaurants. Bed bugs are not.

Brewer first went down this Bed Bug Task Force/resales of mattresses road in the fall of 2006, but we haven’t really seen any results yet from these initiatives.

All in all, the city’s response is very ostrich-like. Let’s compare with other cities in the US: San Francisco has guidelines for dealing with bed bugs in apartment buildings, hotels, and other locations, as does the state of California. Lexington, KY and Cincinnati, Ohio health departments (yes, health departments, Mr. Bloomberg) have both declared war on bed bugs.

Lexington tells residents to call the health department if they think they have bed bugs.

Cincinnati has a hotline just for bed bug information. They also have dedicated bed bug trash pickup for discarded furniture. We think encouraging residents to throw furniture away, rather than helping them pay for treatment, is misguided. But Cincinnati is trying. They think education is key. Hear that, Mr. Bloomberg?

San Francisco City Supervisor Chris Daly got $63,000 in this year’s budget to help low-income residents pay for laundry and freezing of possessions. San Francisco politicians listened to SRO activists who told them this money was needed. Because poor people seriously can’t afford to do the necessary tenant’s part of bed bug treatment.

And let me be clear: not one of these localities is doing enough to combat bed bugs. None of them, not by a long shot. Much more help is needed, especially laws about disclosure of infestations, tracking of infestations by government agencies (so someone is actually paying attention to where bed bugs are spreading), and financial assistance to landlords, homeowners, and tenants who are having trouble paying for preparations and effective treatment. Bringing back some of the recently outlawed, more effective pesticides for targeted bed bug use would go a long way (and no, I do not mean DDT).

Meanwhile, NYC is doing none of this. The NYC Department of Education has deployed “bed bug kits” to schools. Their website claims:

Schools are not an ideal location for bed bugs to reproduce, because they are nocturnal insects that require feeding prior to reproduction; but in the event that bedbugs do show up in our schools, the DOE’s Pest Management Unit is providing a Bed Bug Kit to deal with specimens.

This is erroneous information. Bed bugs are nocturnal if food is available at night, pure and simple. Transplanted to schools, they will bite, reproduce, and thrive. This is an example of wishful thinking, which seems to be the backbone of NYC’s bed bug policy.

NYC does not even tell tenants to call 311 about bed bugs, unless they wade through the HPD website looking for this directive.

And yet bases its assessment of the severity of the problem on those calls.

Discuss.

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