Bedbugs in the West End? – Not New

It was on the news the last few days. I have to wonder how they didn’t see that coming? There have been enormous outbreaks of infestation in the east end for at least a couple of years. I’ve blogged about it for at least two. The health department knew it, I spoke to them about it. The social worker (I am on disability) I spoke to about my fears of the infestation knew all about it. It was someone from the department of health who told me about lavender, also boric acid, but I knew about that already. I took the photo below in August 2006, when the problem as already being addressed in our building in east Vancouver.

I grew lavender on my balcony, it was sprinkled into my carpet on rinsed into the bed sheets. Now I understand why in the old country people, old people, did that. I was horrified at the thought of being infested. we looked into better housing but that is easier said than done on what disability allows for shelter.

I had read about bedbugs in vancouver dating back to 2004. They didn’t see it coming? Example of previously know instances; http://bedbugregistry.com/location/BC/V5L/Vancouver/1855-E-Georgia-St/ , just run a Google search on “bedbugs vancouver 2004 2005 2006″ and there is plenty. So why claim this is new to Vancouver? Why blame overseas travel? More like it’s not a problem as long as it happens to the poor and destitute. Short sighted thinking. eventually if you don’t deal with it from the beginning, it will spread. Just like tuberculosis is going to spread, and an assortment of other maladies. There will be roaches everywhere, bedbugs in the best hotels during the Olympics. Shameful. Where does the fault lie.

The commentators blame overseas travel as the source. well guaranteed on the pitiful disability and welfare allowances for shelter and food we are not traveling abroad and bringing them back with us. What utter crap. It just means no one wants to take responsibility for having turned a blind eye to a part of the population crying out for better circumstances and not being listened to, not a bit. The poor are being wished away and swept under the carpet.

Well, last summer we found one. I went berserk, I took it as a personal failing that it happened to me. Even though I knew the building manager had not, even with professionals on the job. managed to get it under control in the “red zone” units. As I mentioned I am disabled. I struggle to maintain an acceptable level of housekeeping. Eight years ago I was assessed by the health department as requiring daily help with my housekeeping and very briefly someone came in to help me, but then the government changed and all the services ended. I am not the only disabled or elderly person struggling just with the daily housekeeping, there are many. I spend so much of my day that it it leaves little to no time and energy for anything else, like enjoying my life, or seeing a friend now and then. It feels a lot like punishment, though I’ve done nothing wrong. I am fighting war against squalor and there is no government department who will help directly.

As I was saying we found one last summer, now it may have been a straggler brought in from the hallway or even elsewhere, but tat didn’t matter, what mattered was it was here and we could not know how settled it had become. So we searched the Internet for solutions beyond the lavender and boric acid. We found a product called “Thwart” and ordered it, the testimonials seemed real enough and their claims supported. We spend a full and exhausting week cleaning everything inside out and spraying as directed. It isn’t toxic to an or pets so we could stay in,and if it worked not one stick of furniture needed to be discarded. Within a couple of weeks no other had made an appearance and with the stuff active for six months we could relax a little. Just to be completely safe we also bought, at London Drugs, something called diatomaceous earth, (read about it here: http://www.tallmanscientific.com/bed-bug-control.php and here http://biopestcontrol.com/html/diatom_dust.html) basically dried sharp edge diatoms as found in seawater, so sharp it cuts into he bugs walking over it and dehydrates them from the outside in, whereas the boric acid works when licked off dehydrating them from the inside out. We did both. Our landlord (whatever the typical image of a landlord in the east side) refunded the outlay of the spray bought on-line and the manager delighted that it had worked. So there was hope.

The battle however is ongoing. As long as there is poverty and insufficient help for those who need it, whether it is better housing, more expendable income to take care of an infestation, or housekeeping for those too ill to it for themselves. For as long as there are the poor, the rest of the population will blame them, the poor here, and the poor abroad, even though, as mentioned before, we can’t afford to travel. Poverty will keep infestations like this and others, communicable illnesses, addictions, mental illness and crime which uses the desperation of the poor to let them do the dirty work with promises of getting them out of the rut. The poor will use discarded items keep or resell items and not know they are infested and it starts again elsewhere. Bugs don’t care if you are rich or poor, as long as your blood is warm.

It is hard not to smile a little when hearing t hit the other side of the city has the problem now too, but really i ant the problem and others like it to be addressed ad eliminated – for all of us. I once lived in the west End for 12 years, my kids went to school there and I worked there. Then I became ill with a progressive neurological illness and dependent on the safety net. The same one I had paid into for thirty years. Only to find out it had gaping holes that no one is/was interested in fixing. Disillusioned that I had been taken advantage of all the years I worked, and now had to skip meals to afford some bedbug diatomaceous dust.

You skip meals for every little added expense, or when the price of something like a loaf of bread goes up. My days are taken up with cleaning which hurts and exhausts me. To depersonalise and insult the disabled further we no longer have our own workers, we are numbers only. Find it insulting that disability has no distinction, our cheques are the same as welfare checks, I feel insults us, and we are given no system of our own, trained to help us specially.

When the hoops are just too hard to jump through, you make do, because there is no energy to fight for your rights and needs. Forced to live as we are, when we have no energy left for housekeeping at all, the bugs, the rats, and crime will take what little there is left. Reality is that many if not most of us cannot work, we get progressively weaker. The mayor’s much applauded plan to have many disabled working during the Olympics disregards those of us who struggle for a breath, a day upright, and a future of worse days. The Mayor insults and ignores us, much like the province does. We live in fear, and listen to announcements of surplus, corporate bailouts, expensive studies into problems which are obvious and have obvious answers. Pardon me if I smile a little. You might want to think about he spread of old foes such as tuberculosis, because now is he time to do something, the bedbug is a warning.

The best way to deal with crime, mental illness and the spread of these plagues is to address poverty, not by studying it, but by making sure everyone has their basic needs – food, shelter, safety, belonging and acceptance (love), health – met and their dignity back. Until that is done, here will be plagues and outbreaks on your side of the city as well as mine, I was mugged a few months ago, and there have been robberies in Kerrisdale too. When it happens to the other side I cannot help smile,but it comes from my pain. Fix it and we can all smile for far better reasons.

At least I have housing,my own bathroom and I have my dog. Life is tenuous when you are poor, and most of the poor here are either disabled as a result of poverty or became this poor because of a disability. You live here in a daily sense of loss and a fear of future losses.

So pardon me if I smile a little that the other side has some bedbugs, at least they can afford it. If the other side wants to prevent this sort of thing they are going to have to address poverty. Instead of bailing out corporations perhaps they should work on a real safety net and rid this city of its poverty, now that, and not the Olympics would be a true achievement.

other articles I’ve written on the topic:
http://my.opera.com/alettames/blog/show.dml/271571
http://my.opera.com/alettames/blog/tenancyuncertain?cid=3995978

From the Lab Rat’s Desk – November 7, 2007

Are my Neighbours really heartless fascists?

I am tired of all the negativity projected onto my building by a residents association I had never heard of until reading and article interviewing them on the building I live in, brought on by the mass evictions at 2100 block of Pandora Street. That building, which after a flood brought on by a despicable lack on maintenance had the city mass evict the tenants. Those tenants are having a very rough time finding housing, mostly because there is none, none that would approach the level of housing they had in that fated building. They had their own place, their own kitchen and bathroom. Most of the housing out there at their level of income will have neither.

The arguments goes, well they won’t have bed bugs and mice, and floods at least. No one can guarantee that. Bedbugs have no notion of what is and what is not the appropriate building to infest. It takes on traveller on a coat to start and infestation. The bug doesn’t suddenly realize he’s in the Hyatt and immdiately packs up and leaves to the Lower East Side. I’ve seen mice and rats on Granville Island, well fed. Lots of expensive, yet leaky condos sport molds, fungus and floods, every bit as noxious. If it was so much worse at the building at 2100 Pandora it was for one reason, the tenants were poor and the landlord knew he would have tenants whether he spent money on the building or not. The landlord has no competition, he doesn’t have to try. If there were sufficient units for people in low income groups to rent they would choose the best for their money and this slumlord would soon find himself with a largely vacant building. With more buildings to choose from tenants could be choosier as to hygiene, upkeep and other tenants. Most of us would, given the choice choose to live somewhere safe from the criminal element.

Apparently this residents association has a problem with tenants who have no choice but to live where they do, and have the expectation that by moving out some of these tenants everything will change. It wasn’t mentioned that often the trouble comes from drug trafficking done in the park opposite. It would also seem obvious that people using drugs in the alleys haven’t got apartments here or they’d be using their drugs indoors. The laws should have more teeth and a police presence by way of patrolling the park and area regularly might help a lot. It might help also if the city had a less lax attitude to drug use. It sends mixed messages by providing safe injection sites and at the same time complaining that people use drugs. No one bats and eye when marijuana is smoked on public streets and in the park. It may be “only” marijuana, but it is illegal and with that comes drug trade, and whom easier to recruit to sell than the poorest who need to scrape by. What the residents association really wants is to get rid of the unsightly poor which is keeping their property values from skyrocketing as in other neighbourhoods in Vancouver.

The attack is on the victims of poverty, and it should be on poverty itself. If you have people living in conditions not even suitable for a dog, you cannot expect them to live with the same civility as those who live in comfort with no worries where the next meal comes from with no certainly one day to the next of having shelter. Give the poor the basics of a dignified and life and the tools to maintain and improve their standing in society and many of the crime typically associated with the poor will go away, there will be no need for self-medicating or panhandling for a meal and some shelter,

Build sufficient housing, not SROs which have all the same problems of no dignity, no security, no privacy. How can someone who’s been victimised in the sex trade or in domestic violence heal in an environment where they have to share washroom facilities? Can a paranoid personality do well in such an environment? Will depression cease when all you have is a small room and live with people you don’t know in such close quarters? These are nothing more than poorhouses, we’re taking a giant step back as a society.

Sufficient housing, apartments, the same size as anyone else would have not the Major’s eco-density which is a spectacularly bad idea, we’ve done all those experiments with rats in our social psychology classes, you deprive rats of private space and they will turn on each other, there will be mahem, chaos and all that comes with it. Give them more space and all settles down. Everyone should have a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a balcony. Safe, Clean with communal space for socialising. The best example I have seen of this is the PAL building for performing artists in coal harbour.

If you put the poor exclusively in SROs what becomes of the children, are they put in foster care while the parents try to find against all odds a place to live together? Living in illegal suites, dealing with yet another unscrupulous landlord (of which there seem to be plenty). Better they have dignified suitably sized apartments, safe play space for the kids. Surly providing this kind of housing ultimately saves lost of money. Instead of spending lots of money on emergency shelter in hotels, crisis funds for resettlement, and foster care. Health will improve, hopelessness will be replaced by a sense of dignity a sense that we are a part of the community not the target for jibes by the upwardly mobile. Build sufficient rental housing to ensure a market which allows a tenant to make choices about where they would like to live instead of being relocated to places they have no support, no history. Charge them what is fair, on a sliding scale, as they have more they pay more, but always as a percentage to leave them also with enough for food. The subsidy can be paid directly to the landlord. All tenants pay but what they pay is between them and the landlord and social workers, they can be part of a community no more or less worthy than the next.

Do the sick, elderly and disabled have to share bathroom facilities? Are we not allowed some dignity and privacy, at minimum a self contained rental unit with bathroom and kitchen facilities. For the past few years I feel constantly under threat of losing what little I have. Obviously it is not paranoia, it is happening. The extra stress is having impact on my health, I cannot imagine coping with having to relocate with little time and a near 0 vacancy rate. What further will I be asked or expected to give up? I take some joy from living with my son, and my pets. I need the pets, they give me reason to get up. I need my son, he helps me when my illness requires someone help me and goodness knows there is no home care of any kind, without him I face living in a home. So I would lose my independence, the relationships that are therapeutic and provide me with love and dignity, I would lose (well have lost this already) security and safety. Probably it ould mean living with fewer and fewer of my belongings as the living spaces available become smaller and smaller and less and less private.

Once upon a time I felt like a human being who mattered, and I was convinced that paying high rates of taxation which left my paycheck smaller even when I received raises, well it provided for a safety net for those folks who were left disabled, or ill, unable to manage, and, I reasoned, it might one day even be me. Well it is me, the tax rates are still high, and there is no safety net, no kindness and no dignity.

My fellow human being, the ones having the face to once introduce themselves to me as their “neighbours” now have a residency association, one to which I was never invited. Their little group manage a newspaper article calling my building and affront to their sensibilities. Yes, there have been and may still be a drug dealer or two here, I see strange people going in and out of my building. Pretty much as it has been in any large building with many suites which I’ve lived in, most of those in far more “upscale” areas. What they did not mention were the tenants who lives here who use a wheelchair, walk with a cane, walk with difficulty, are elderly, are new to this country, young families with little children, middle aged ladies who found themselves single, poor and wanting to have a pet. Many of us are pet owners. Many of us are former victims of crime, some are recovering alcoholics or drug users.

The neighbours complain of whistling to get the attention of “drug dealers”. Purely an assumption. I’ve whistled to get my son’s attention if he’s on the Internet and I foolishly forgot my key. I’ve seen people do it behind the more upscale building of condos at the corner of Garden and Pandora, and someone then threw him a key. The neighbours assume we are poor so must be up to no good and wouldn’t the property values just go up is we were gone. Some neighbours. They can’t see that they have at least 50 neighbours in this building. I’ve been nothing but friendly to my neighbours and their two-faced-ness hurts me. Thanks to them I might find myself homeless, disabled, losing for the last months or (hopefully) years of my life privacy, dignity, freedom, not because I am a criminal, but because I am now poor. Regardless all the tax I have paid, decades of working in the not for profit sector, raising good kids to adulthood, being a grandma. None of it matters, I am poor, no one cares, and the landlord, well he might choose to take advantage of the moment, my neighbours have set me and 50 neighbours up for being homeless with no place to go. I love my little apartment, I’ve lived here seven years and it is my home. There are no modern conveniences such as dishwashers, or in suite washer/dryers, no thermostats no thermal glass windows, the rugs are very old, but it is my home. It took months to get this apartment, landlords don’t like renting to the poor, disabled or welfare makes no difference to them. I am happy here, and the building manager is doing an amazing job considering she has to manage 56 suites by herself with no help. If I need a new washer for a tap, or if a board breaks on my balcony, they fix it right away.

this is my home of seven years

Today we were given notices, shoved under the door, I’ll keep it simple and just post the scan right here for you to read. I feel intimidated. I am terribly sad. It is making me more ill, I’ve been in bed for days with worsening of my symptoms, emotionally my son and I are both wound tight and unable to enjoy much of anything. I am not sure I can live through being evicted and relocated, or worse endlessly being jockeyed from a night here in one shelter or someone’s couch for goodness knows how long. These fear raising tactics are cruel. You can’t threaten a rich person by doing this, the rich have options, choices, we only have fear.

Some related articles, follow these links:

The Evictor – Vancouver Eviction Services
http://www.lestwarog.com/newspaper/theevictor.html

Tenants fighting mad over eviction notices
http://www.gregorbc.ca/node/89
http://anarchocyclist.ca/2004/09/08/quick-humourous-landlord-update/
http://www.realestatetalks.com/viewtopic.php?p=85259

why are the neighbours so unfriendly?