In less than nine months, New York City Housing Authority residents filed nearly 60,000 work orders for bedbug and cockroach infestation, according to data released by the Legal Aid Society on Monday. With about 564,000 NYCHA residents, that's about 1 work order for every 10 residents.
The data, gathered from a Freedom of Information Law request, showed that the city's public housing developments had 59,770 work orders for the pests between January and September 10th, 2019. The organization found the highest number of work orders were in Harlem's Grant Houses (981) East New York's Linden Houses (862) and Edenwald Houses in the Bronx (860).
The top 10 NYCHA development for roaches or bedbug work orders between January 2019 and September 10th, 2019.
"The high number of work orders filed by NYCHA residents to remediate insect infestations within their homes is indeed troubling," Legal Aid's attorney-in-charge of the Civil Law Reform Unit Judith Goldiner said in a press release.
The top 10 NYCHA development for roach work orders January 2019 to September 10th, 2019.
Pomonok Houses in Queens topped the list for bedbug work orders at 116. Grant and Wagner were not far behind with 104 and 102 bedbug work orders, respectively. Per Legal Aid's analysis of the data, there were a total of 5,028 work orders for bedbugs during this time period—considered an emergency by the authority.
The top 10 NYCHA developments for bedbug work orders January 2019 to September 10th, 2019.
In response to a request for comment on the data, NYCHA spokesperson Rochel Leah Goldblatt pointed to a drop in the total number of work orders between 2018 and 2019.
There were 87,400 work orders in 2018 compared to 84,516 last year, and for bedbugs, 12,220 in 2018 to 10,343 in 2019, according to the Daily News, which first reported on Legal Aid's data. Those numbers suggest a surge in bedbug work orders the last four months of last year—5,315 for the rest of September through the end of the year. NYCHA did not immediately explain the late fall spike.
Bedbugs are a pernicious and infamously resilient parasite that have long-plagued New Yorkers. Though a data analysis in 2018 found bedbug violations the Department of Housing and Preservation issues to landlords have dropped by 28 percent in the past five years, some pest control experts have suggested bedbugs aren't going away, but rather, tenants are filing complaints more often.
The time to remediate bedbug problems at NYCHA also dropped from 13.3 days to 9.7 days in 2019.
Goldblatt said the decrease in pest gripes and remediation time for bedbugs is a part of an integrated pest management technique and pest action plan set a year ago with federal monitor, Bart Schwartz, appointed to the post last February.
Roach complaints took a day longer to remediate between 2018 and 2019, Goldblatt confirmed, but she said it is due to a system in which exterminators caulk holes and vacuum instead of spraying health-harming chemicals. Bedbug remediation times weren't impacted by the integrated management system like the roaches since those pests are treated as an emergency—a protocol set last summer.
The improved time to close out bedbug work orders is a "clear byproduct of more staff on the ground and resources," Legal Aid's Goldiner acknowledged. There were 20 new exterminators hired last year, per the Daily News, and the authority has funds for a total of 147 field exterminators this year, NYCHA said.
With that, Legal Aid is calling for $2 billion from the state and $1 billion from the city to address NYCHA's capital needs and overall problems public housing residents face. "Public housing is critical to so many New Yorkers and we must ensure that residents live safely and with dignity," she added.
But those numbers are a far cry from NYCHA's unmet capital needs of $32 billion—a 2017 estimate that is projected to soar to $68.5 billion by 2028 under the authority's worst-case scenario. Goldblatt noted: "NYCHA lacked the resources to adequately address many issues in its aging housing portfolio, including pests, due to years of federal disinvestment."
State Senator Brian Benjamin—who represents Grant Houses where the most work orders for roaches were filed—said the state needs to pay its "fair share," which would total more than Legal Aid's suggested $2 billion. He didn't specify how much the state should provide NYCHA, but told Gothamist in a statement, "The residents of developments in my district like Grant Houses deserve a coordinated thoughtful response to issues in their homes, not piecemeal funding that doesn’t address the real problems."
