NEW YORK—New Yorkers are awash in high-profile, public, bedbug infestations these days. In some cases, building management, with their livelihood at stake, takes care of the problem with a qualified exterminator in a timely and thorough manner. But for the city’s most vulnerable, especially people living in low or mid-income rental units, bedbugs easily become a recurring nightmare that under current city regulations is likely to never go away.
And until the city gets its act together, the rest of us will just have to deal with it.
Bedbugs travel on clothing, in luggage, and in bags, and they can drop down and breed anywhere. They prefer crevices, cracks, and upholstery. As long as there are human beings around to feed on, they will be content. Bedbugs feed almost exclusively on human blood and can survive up to a year without a meal.
The secret of eradicating bedbugs is to kill the creatures wherever they are found. Bedbugs are much harder to eradicate than cockroaches, mice, or rats, the vermin that prompted current housing regulation and enforcement policy.
With a series of recent initiatives underway—including a state law proposed by Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal that would require landlords to disclose to prospective tenants the building’s history of infestation, as well as a $500,000 initiative by the city administration to take action on the problem—it is clear that the government is getting the message.
But a lack of clear guidelines and policies specifically targeting the bedbug problem has caught city officials unprepared, and new initiatives will take time to implement. Tenants, as well as the general public are suffering as a result.
City Sightings
Sightings in New York have grown exponentially since around 2004. According to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), violations issued for bedbugs have so far reached 4,808 in 2010, compared to just 82 in 2004.
Violations are issued when HPD officials visit the premises and confirm the existence of bugs, after a tenant makes a complaint through the city’s 311 hotline.
According to a recently released Bed Bug Advisory Board report, calls to 311 to issue complaints were up 54 percent between 2008 and 2009, for a total of 33,772 suspected sightings.
Just last week, on Aug. 17, the latest high-traffic public area fell victim to bedbugs, when the AMC Empire 25 movie theater on 42nd Street got closed for a night. Management brought in dogs to confirm the existence of the bugs after receiving a complaint from a patron. The theater closed early, the pest control company was called in to exterminate, and the establishment reopened the following day, according to its management.
In July, two popular retail clothing stores, Hollister in SoHo and Abercrombie & Fitch in the South Street Seaport, were found to have the bugs. The insects have also been discovered in the New York Public Library, the Time Warner Center, and the Empire State Building.
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Brooklyn D.A. Charles J. Hynes also called in the exterminators for an infestation of four floors of his offices last week.
Pest-control companies can effectively handle bedbugs if they use the right methods, and if they are allowed to access all parts of the infected area. When exterminating apartment buildings with widespread infestations, every room much be accessed in order to abate the insects.
Such procedures can be very costly, causing landlords to be reluctant to spend the money it takes to eradicate the bugs completely. Certain landlords, as well as tenants, do not understand their mutual rights and responsibilities related to room access.
“The landlords are often unwilling to do the upfront [investment] and deal with the issue once and for all, and instead sort of do piecemeal, ineffective remedies,” said Mario Mazzoni, spokesman for the Metropolitan Council on Housing, a membership organization dedicated to preserving and expanding New York City’s supply of decent, affordable housing.
A Festering Problem
Ken Gibson and others in his building have experienced the harassment of bedbugs for as long as they can remember. They live in one of the last remaining Bowery-style buildings. Such buildings, named for the Manhattan street on the Lower East Side where they first appeared, were commonly built prior to 1949 to house garment workers, army and navy personnel on leave, or anyone looking for an inexpensive, short-term stay.
The rooms are tiny and cubicle-style, like prison cells, just big enough for a bed and standing space. The bathrooms are shared, and there are no kitchens. Rooms rent for $20 a night, $140 a week, or $560 a month. No deposits or credit checks are required.
The Vigilant Hotel, located on Eighth Avenue near 28th Street just down the street from the Fashion Institute of Technology in Chelsea, is one of these short-term occupancy places (SRO).
The low threshold of entry offered by SROs caters to marginalized members of society. Tenants at the Vigilant are largely seniors on fixed incomes, the mentally unstable, or the drug and alcohol dependent, with a few others who are staying there until they get back on their feet again.
What people wouldn’t imagine when they answer the Vigilant’s ad, which runs frequently in the Village Voice, is that for that kind of money they would have to live with bedbugs.
Mike Snell, manager of the building for 25 years, says he warns people before they rent to expect the creatures. In fact, he hands out a non-toxic bug spray to assist residents in protecting themselves.
“We seem to be the only building that gives tenants a free, complimentary, liquid bug spray,” says Snell.
Chris Lugo, a former paratrooper with the U.S. army who served in Afghanistan in 2003–04, found himself at the Vigilant earlier this year. He confirms that he was warned about the bugs when he first called the hotel, but he mistakenly thought they were referring to cockroaches. It wasn’t until after he got into his room that he noticed red spots all over the walls.
“It has to be something that drinks blood,” Lugo recalled thinking to himself before he realized that they were bedbugs.
“I kind of started tearing the room apart,” he explained. “I found like thousands of thousands of thoraxes bunched up in the cracks. I was really in distress … and I didn’t have anywhere else to stay.”
In desperation, Lugo went out and bought some heavy-duty insecticide and cleaning supplies to “decontaminate” his room.
Five hours later he was satisfied that he had killed everything and was about to fill in all the cracks with paint, when he says Snell confronted him and said that he had to leave if he didn’t like the room the way it was.
Lugo decided to leave, never having spent a night in that room. His rent money was returned and he was reimbursed for the cleaning supplies.
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William Riddick, 64, is a retired security guard and has lived in the Vigilant for seven years.
“I’ve been to the hospital 3-4 times, and the M.D. told me [that] I should not be in a place like this, But I have nowhere else to go,” he said.
According to Gibson, who has tried to mobilize others in his building to complain about the problem but to little avail, the other tenants are intimidated or unable to act and are afraid to speak out.
Should they speak out, they likely wouldn’t get far, since Snell, who says they fumigate different areas of the building twice a month, appears to be resigned to the bedbug problem.
“It would be nice to wish otherwise, but we don’t,” he said. “We encourage people to see it for what it is. If somebody has any qualms about it, we encourage them to go elsewhere rather than waste their time and money, as well as ours, by complaining. It is too bad if you don’t like it, but why would you want to subject yourself to something that you feel isn’t good enough?” he added.
The Complaints Process
Snell’s policy of averting people who exhibit discomfort with the living conditions at the Vigilant appears to have kept HPD complaints to a minimum compared to other buildings, as well as kept city concerns under the radar.
According to its short list of violations with the HPD—20 open violations, compared with upward of 400 for the city’s worst—it would appear that the Vigilant is a model building.
Gibson, who has refused to pay his rent since March citing overcharging as the reason, has recently taken to complaining and to testing the legal process.
“As a human being what other option do I have … unless I take things into my own hands?” Gibson asked.
“I am pursuing the normal civilized channels that anyone would,” he added.
In response to Gibson’s complaint, HPD inspected the building and issued violations for bedbugs, mice, and roaches on May 24. A violation letter was then sent to the Vigilant.
Next, the Vigilant informed the HPD that the violations were corrected. Snell claims to have used a certified pest-control company, Superb Pest Control.
The tenant is then issued a letter from HPD reporting the violation corrections. By the time Gibson received his letter, he had just one day left to go to the Manhattan Borough Office to dispute the claim, which he did.
Gibson has not heard back from HPD with regard to his dispute, filed on July 26, and he is still living with bedbugs.
Gibson has also taken his landlord to Housing Court and won a consent order from the judge. He is asking his landlord to place lids on trash cans in hallways, replace his cubicle door with a tight fitting door and replace his current wire mesh roof with a solid roof.
Snell argues that fire regulations prevent him from installing actual ceilings over the cubicles, because the renovation would require individual smoke detectors. Building management admits that overhead screens allow vermin and bugs to travel from room to room, but they must be there in order to allow overhead sprinklers to work in case of a fire.
The premises, registered this year as a rooming house with 107 stabilized units, is regulated by antiquated building codes from 1949. All but two of these types of buildings have been fully renovated. The other is the Glenwood in Brooklyn, where online reviewers also cite a horrible bedbug problem.
The Yumin Management Corporation is listed as the owner of the Vigilant, but names and contact information for the actual responsible persons could not be located despite persistent effort. According to Snell, the owners have no plans to renovate.
Government Response
“It is horrible to have to live with bedbugs, and it is the landlord’s obligation under the Warranty of Habitability to ensure that tenant’s apartments are free of bedbugs, and that they take it seriously and hire firms that specialize in getting rid of them and ensure that their apartments are free of bedbugs,” said Assemblywoman Rosenthal.
Mazzoni insists that the law is absolutely clear about the fact that landlords have the responsibility to eradicate infestations of bedbugs, and when it comes to individual units, they have the right to access them for the purposes of extermination. The most important part of extermination, he says, is to conduct it building-wide.
Mazzoni also emphasizes that the issue is not about being unclean or unsanitary.
“They smell human blood, they eat human blood, and they can do just fine because they live off of you and not off food scraps,” he explained.
Councilwoman Gale Brewer, an early advocate of the city’s Bed Bug Advisory Board, which released a comprehensive report on the issue this April, has obtained $500,000 in funding to advance a strategy for dealing with bedbugs with some help from Council Speaker Christine Quinn.
“They [bedbugs] are in all the city agency offices,” Brewer admitted to The Epoch Times.
“All of these city workers have complained to me, because they go into these apartments and they catch bedbugs, and they go home with them. You know it is not good for anybody,” she added.
“Bedbugs have become a serious issue for many New Yorkers, especially those least equipped to deal with them,” states the Bed Bug Advisory Board report.
The city’s strategy is to create a map-based online portal to track the existence of the bugs and give residents and visitors an opportunity to avoid meeting up with an unexpected encounter with the menace.
Protocols for disposing of infected items, suggested best practices for pest control companies, an immediate response how-to guide, and public awareness are key aspects of the strategy.
“I want more crackdown on landlords to make sure that they comply with the Warranty of Habitability,” Rothenburg of the report. “For example, if your apartment is overrun with roaches, they have to exterminate. And sometimes they do, but I want that in writing. We have to be much tougher on them,” she added.
“What we need, among other things, is legislation that will actually prescribe the type of healthy, safe, and effective methods that will actually deal with bedbugs, and to significantly ramp up the enforcement and punishment for failure to comply,” Mazzoni noted.
