09.09.10

Bedbugs and Decay

Posted in Census, Stumble and Fail at 1:39 pm by George Smith

Bedbugs are having a party in the US. If you could own them as an appreciating asset, they’d be better than gold.

Which is sort of what a New York Times story had to say on the pests a few days ago.

In hard times, the only people doing well are the rich and bedbug exterminators.

“Bedbugs gave Linda Develasco of Des Plaines, Ill., a new career when she was laid off from her job as a new-accounts manager at Verizon two years ago,” reported the Times. “Having learned about bedbugs in the hospitality industry from her fiancé, who was general manager of a hotel, she bought a bedbug-sniffing beagle named Scooby for $9,700. She recouped the expense within three months by doing one to three inspections each week.”

That story is here.

You will want to read to the part where one exterminator is so happy over bedbug infestation he has to pull over to the side of the road and do a little jig. Bedbugs meant his ship came in big time.

For every story like this there have been at least a dozen on what to do about bedbugs and why they’re multiplying.

The New York Times story gives some inkling and it jives with DD’s thinking and experience.

Keep in mind, bedbugs live with people. And when people are forced to move bedbugs move with them.

The Times story informs that in the catastrophe economy, many apartment managers cut back on exterminations, hoping to save money. And if you’ve been living in an apartment complex, you know the Great Recession has caused a great deal of churn. People move in — a month or two later, they’re gone.

In the short term, apartment managers probably thought they were saving money. But they never counted on bedbugs hitching a ride in inside the packaging and mattresses of the displaced moving in from other places. Or resurgence of the insects once a spraying regime wasn’t suppressing them.

DD worked enumerating downtown Pasadena for the census. It is the most densely populated part of town with most of the people living in apartments, ritzy condos and older homes subdivided into boarding room flophouses.

During the time of the census it was quite apparent to me and a friend working the same beat that the Great Recession was having a real impact. And none of it was good.

There were people moving in and out everywhere. And there was a good amount of vacancy and noticeable deterioration, even in the most outwardly upscale-looking complexes. In such places, the corporate management often fought hard to impede the US Census. They did not readily disclose the number of vacancies in their buildings.

In fact, often they had to be forced into cooperation with the government, either by firmly telling them it was the law that they comply, or by simply going into the places and doing it the hard way — knocking on the doors of all the tenants next door to units which did not respond and questioning them until a complete picture on the address block was assembled.

Corporate property management’s often surprising and dismaying opposition to the federal mandate is a topic for greater discussion in another post. But in the context of this one on bedbugs, some of it had to do with bosses trying to cover up their rates of vacancy arising from the Great Recession.

Scientists are, naturally, keenly interested in why bedbugs have become such a problem. Some have ventured to say that it’s because they have achieved a surprising resistance to pesticides. This is true but also probably not the entire story, which will only emerge in a few years.

DD reckons bedbug success is due, in part, to US fail. The economic slump has ripped up a lot of lives and thrown them into the wind. And those who are renters who have lost lodgings, along with the cut back in sprayings at the same places, have created a great environment in which bedbugs can breed freely and hitch rides on the dislocated.

If you read the New York Times story, bedbug extermination isn’t cheap. In fact, it’s priced as a scarce commodity in a time of need.

No standard renter is going to pay $500 or up for a Terminix man to come to their place and get rid of bedbugs.

They’ll try to do it themselves with insecticides from the hardware store and keep quiet about it. And learn to battle or live with the pests until better days come around.

If they ever do. In the meantime, bedbugs will be doing fine.

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