There’s a stalemate:

She said she’d gladly move somewhere else — if her landlord returns her $2,000 deposit.

He said he’d gladly let her go — if she paid his $212 exterminator bill.

And there’s also the matter of the second tenant camping in a second tent. The PCO says they second tenant does not have bed bugs. However, we do know that new infestations often are hard to detect. The suggestion is that the apartments may have become infested after the landlord “cleaned” a vacant store.

As the Star reports,

Two weeks ago, Priaulx, a 34-year-old on social assistance, moved into the seven-unit Lake Shore Blvd. W. with her three children.

Last Thursday, she said, after Salo fumigated the vacant retail store attached to the building, she began seeing the bugs.

“I saw them later on Thursday night. I found one in the living room, one in my daughter’s room, and then progressively I saw more and more and more until I saw clusters of them in the apartment. In the bedding, in our couch.”

If the landlord set off a fogger (since it sounds like he did his own “fumigation”) this is known to spread bed bugs into the walls and into other adjacent units. This is why people with bed bugs should not use bug bombs.

Since the tenants aren’t out for any kind of monetary awards, save a returned deposit, it is hard to believe they’d be sleeping in a tent, in the heat of summer, next to a garbage pile infested with raccoons, mice, and rats, and in an area frequented by hookers and drug dealers (by the tenant’s description) if they did not feel they needed to.

• Comedian moves into NJ Ikea store
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• New Britain, CT: how can building managers turn a good building bad? Ignore the bed bugs.

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One of those residents threw away all her furniture and sent her kids away. She claimed the PCO’s treatment ruined their furniture and that the units are still infested. Check out the article and click the button to watch the video from CityNews.ca.

While it is normal for some bed bugs to remain after the first treatment (most infestations require three or more treatments before bed bugs are entirely gone), it is not normal for treatment to ruin furniture. Also, an additional factor here is that traditional PCO treatment requires you to sleep in your usual spot in order to act as bait, drawing bed bugs out to the pesticides. While we often want to flee, there’s good reason to stay put.

Nevertheless, it should demonstrate for the uninitiated just how bad bed bugs are, that these folks would sleep next to a garbage pile rather than in their home.

CityNews.ca also included an informative “What to do if you have bed bugs” article, linked from the other story.

• Toronto tenants camping outside to avoid bed bugs: update
• More bed bug stories from Cincinnati; also, pig spotted in sky over New York City
• 25 Grant Street in Denver, Colorado: bed bugs for two years
• The Bed Bug of the Future

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