When he was young, Tony Ashby made his living as many artists do: playing piano part of the time and working in food service the rest. At 51, he no longer works -- he developed a seizure disorder years ago -- but, until just recently, he still played piano every week at his church.
He had to stop going to church, he says, because of a problem that had overrun his life. Ashby lives at Market House, an apartment building on First Avenue in the Pike Place Market. Over the summer, he found himself itching and scratching all the time and saw that when his brother came over to visit, he was itching and scratching, too.
One day, his next-door neighbor came over and asked Ashby if he had bedbugs. "No!" Ashby replied. Bedbugs, he thought, came from being dirty, and the dapper Ashby keeps a clean house. "Well, I do," the neighbor told him, then showed him a string of red insect bites on his arm.
The next day, a Market maintenance worker knocked on Ashby's door, came in and lifted up his couch.
"And here these bugs came crawling," he says. "That's how I found out."
Since then, it's been a nightmare of creepy-crawlers, endless laundry and repeated pest control sprays, and Ashby and his neighbor are not alone. Pike Place Market residents of eight apartments at Market House, Stewart House and the Sanitary Market are currently battling bedbugs -- largely, some tenants say, with little support or information from the Market's operator, the Preservation and Development Authority (PDA).
That, unfortunately, is not unusual. After 40 years of absence, in recent years bedbugs have surged in New York City. The pencil-tip-sized insects, which typically suck blood while humans sleep and can hitchhike from place to place on clothing or packs, first started popping up in Seattle lodgings about two years ago, from posh hotels to homeless shelters.
They are now spreading to apartments like those in the Market that serve disabled and retired residents -- who are hard pressed to pay for a protective mattress cover, launder load after load of clothes and bedding, or withstand the multiple sprayings that it can take to get rid of the bugs, which hide in cracks and crevices of walls and furniture.
Many nonprofit housing operators have had to set up protocols and systems to help tenants tackle the load and abate bugs. The Seattle Housing Authority bought a bedbug-sniffing dog and special bug-killing heaters earlier this year to cope with repeat outbreaks at the Denny Terrace apartments on Capitol Hill. But like many property managers before it, the PDA says it didn't know the right steps to take at first. As a result, tenants say, management let at least two months pass before telling all residents at Market House what to look for and how to protect themselves -- a common mistake, housing operators say, that only spreads rumors, anxiety, misinformation and the insects themselves.
One of the biggest mistakes a property manager can make, says Nicole Macri, director of administrative services for the Downtown Emergency Service Center, which had an early bedbug outbreak in 2006 at the Lyon Building, is not taking swift action. But nonprofit and market-rate landlords seldom know where to start with bedbugs, which aren't like cockroaches. "By the time you try to figure it out," she says, "you have a huge infestation on your hands and it's that much more difficult to get it under control."
Another mistake, says Heather Barr, a public health nurse who helped found a bedbug task force of emergency shelter and low-income housing providers last fall, is not communicating with tenants.
"Why did they let these bugs crawl all over us and get into our clothes and stuff?" Ashby asks. "They should have let us know from day one."
Day one was sometime in April at Stewart House, where three apartments were first sprayed for bedbugs, says Market spokesperson James Haydu. The PDA's exterminator has since sprayed four units at Market House, including Ashby's, and one in the Sanitary Market. But it wasn't until August, Haydu says, that the PDA had its regular pest control company, Eden Advanced Pest Technologies, add bedbugs to the list of what it looks for during its monthly unit inspections. (Most pest control contracts don't cover bedbugs.) The PDA has also hired a second exterminator called Gotcha just to deal with bedbugs.
In the meantime, affected tenants of Market House and the Sanitary Market say, life with the bedbugs has been hellish. And the person who manages both buildings, some say, isn't making things any easier: Two tenants have received 10-day lease violation notices for trying to get rid of mattresses or box springs on their own -- improperly, Haydu says, by placing them in common areas that shouldn't be exposed to bugs.
Ashby's neighbor, Scott Sorensen, says he and his partner Jenae first noticed they had a problem three months ago with what they thought were little beetles. When he reported it to the office, he says the manager told him that a woman who had died across the hall had had bedbugs. After her death, the woman's son had left her furniture up for grabs in a community room -- and Sorensen and others at Market House had taken pieces of it.
Since then, the couple has gotten two sprayings and is "camping out" on the floor amid their bagged-up belongings -- an ordeal they might have been spared if the PDA has shared information, Sorensen says. Even if the manager only found out after the fact, he says, she certainly knew about the infestation when he talked to her in June: "Management in the Market knew about it, but didn't let anyone know."
On Sept. 3, says Market House resident Mike Smith, a former Real Change volunteer, the problem exploded into the open: One resident who'd gotten a spraying took his mattress and dumped it in the building's second-floor community room, spreading bugs everywhere. "They sprayed his apartment and there were bugs dying all over," Smith says. "It was really gruesome [and] he freaked out."
On Sept. 7, Smith and another resident called a tenant meeting at Market House to discuss the bugs and what to do about them. Shortly after that, Market House distributed a flyer to all tenants showing a picture of a bedbug and telling residents, in part, not to trade furniture, clothing or other items with others in the building.
Since then, Market House has treated its laundry room -- a common site for transferring bedbugs, which a hot wash and hot dry easily kill -- and, on Oct. 13, called a resident meeting at which an exterminator explained the bugs' habits and how difficult and costly they can be to get rid of.
Just ask the Seattle Housing Authority. It's been battling a bedbug problem at Denny Terrace that has now affected 75 of the Capitol Hill building's 220 units. In January, says SHA spokesperson Virginia Felton, the agency paid $7,500 for Taylor, a beagle specially trained to sniff out bedbugs, and about $27,000 for special heaters that can quickly bring an apartment's temperature up to 130 degrees -- roasting bugs before they have a chance to scatter.
The housing authority has also just gotten budget approval to hire another pest control technician: something the agency does in-house not only to save the cost of paying outside exterminators (at roughly $250 a pop), but because it's more effective: One of SHA's three bedbug-trained pest control technicians can respond within a day or two to check out a reported infestation. If an exterminator doesn't happen to be spraying at the Market, by contrast, a tenant there has to wait until his or her next monthly pest control inspection to confirm bedbugs, which could take weeks.
But even with its resources, the SHA's Felton says, the agency isn't winning the battle at Denny Terrace: On Oct. 8, it got a petition from tenants requesting stepped-up sprayings and help for residents to move furniture. It's now considering gassing the building with vikane, a type of sulfate, which would incur the enormous expense of putting every tenant in a hotel for several days. And there's no guarantee that someone won't track in more bedbugs the day after it's done.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem with bedbugs, says Greg Eckerman, housing program director at Plymouth Housing, which manages some 900 Seattle units designated for the formerly homeless. It, too, decided to take its pest control in-house and at any given time, Eckerman says, the agency is treating about 15 units for bedbugs.
"You have to stay on top of it and it requires a lot of education of tenants, which was a critical component once we figured out what was going on," he says.
Like some of his neighbors at Market House right now, Tony Ashby wishes the Market's managers had figured that out before he found a bedbug on his trousers on his way to church one Sunday. That's when he decided to stop going for a while. "I want information," Ashby says. "I need to know what's going on."