Since the Thomas Bean Tower was renovated last year, residents in the low-income housing complex in central Denver have discovered that they have one thing in common with fabulous hotels in Sydney, Australia; high-rise condominiums in Toronto; and pricey apartments in Manhattan.
No, it’s not free wireless Net access.
Sixty years after the tenacious little blood-suckers were all but eradicated through wildly enthusiastic use of DDT, bedbugs are staging a comeback. And when residents moved their belongings into the clean, freshly painted digs at Bean Tower last winter, they brought a starter colony with them.
It’s the last thing Sal Carpio needed.
The executive director of the Denver Housing Authority has been scrambling to achieve the ambitious goals of rehabilitating the public housing complex and integrating it with market- rate condos and apartments in the
$191 million Park Avenue revitalization project. Then the bedbugs started biting, and he could almost hear the property values plummet.
“Our pest control people have been working on this for months,” said Carpio, who couldn’t believe his bad luck when I called the other day to ask about bedbugs. “We think we’ve isolated the problem to two units. We’ve really tried to be vigilant.”
In fairness, Bean Tower isn’t the only building in town that’s infested.
Residents in the privately owned Halcyon House, another subsidized housing facility, have been battling bedbugs for months.
Ellen Dumm, spokeswoman for the Denver Department of Environmental Health, said reports of infestation have come from at least three or four buildings across town “and we’re pretty sure there are private homes that have them that we just haven’t heard about.”
Entomologists don’t know why the bedbug population is exploding after so many decades of decline.
“One thing we do know is that it’s not the result of unsanitary conditions,” Dumm said. The voracious little buggers are just as happy in a fastidiously clean home as a messy one.
The reason they’re frequently reported in low-income housing is because residents often buy used furniture and bedbugs come along in the bargain.
But the epidemic is hardly confined to housing for the poor. The National Pest Management Association reports that pest-control companies are getting 50 times as many calls about bedbugs as they had just a few years ago. Across the country, bedbugs have tormented college students in dormitories, business travelers in luxury hotels, tourists aboard cruise ships and even patients in hospitals.
A study cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta speculates that the bugs are hitchhiking around the world in the clothing and luggage of international airline travelers, that new methods for pest control are less effective and that the insects may be evolving to more
insecticide-resistant strains.
None of that explains why they’re suddenly out of control, though.
About the only good news is that they usually don’t carry diseases, Dumm said. “They’re not pleasant, but mostly they’re just a nuisance.”
The age-old stigma remains a big obstacle to eradicating them.
“People are embarrassed to admit they have the problem,” Carpio said, “so a big part of our effort at Bean Tower has been to educate the residents about how to handle the situation.”
One resident, who insists upon anonymity, thinks he has a solution.
His grandmother swore by banana stalks. Just put one under the bed, and by morning, all the bed bugs will be gone.
The only problem is they’re tough to find in Colorado. So he’s asked his friends to pray that the regular spraying by exterminators will do the job, at least until he can find somebody to ship him a banana stalk from Central America.
It makes me itch just thinking about it.
So I’m thinking maybe he can order two stalks … just in case.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
