Suppose you are not doing so well, you improve your life and decide to rent an apartment in Lockport close to family and friends.
You are moving into this spacious apartment, which is particularly attractive to you because it is part of the city’s history, a house that was once inhabited by the rich and influential Lockports. There is some pride in these enduring, beautifully crafted, one-of-a-kind pieces of New York’s great canal history.
Your landlord is secretive, faux-friendly, someone you are curious about – and reminds you of someone you may have seen or met before. The landlord demands the rent in cash, which is dated. Everyone uses bank transfers and online transactions these days, every dollar is billed electronically!
Regardless, unlike half the nation during the deadly COVID-19 downturn, work and put your suspicions aside. Then, after moving into this new apartment, you wake up one day with your arms covered in small bites. Itchy pinpricks, lumpy lesions. Yuck!
You say to a fellow tenant: “Take a look at this!” The tenant laughs and rolls up his sleeves. He is also covered in the bites.
“Bed bugs,” he says. “You have never seen her before?”
Do a Google search. You will learn that when you see a bed bug and kill it, the exoskeleton protected threat was covered in blood. And if there is, that means there are 1 million hidden in each dark area of the building. They wreak havoc, mainly because of the poor tenants in the lowest social class.
Unclean, the tenants, their fault, you say? Barely.
To blame are the landlords who ignore the problem, fail to inform the new tenants that they are being attacked by an insidious mass of blood sucking pests, and then offer to buy useless, diluted bug spray for the uninformed, untrained, and very vulnerable tenants.
How did it become the tenant’s job to clean a landlord’s building? Who should pay whom?
Bed bugs. Complaint. Expulsion?
The poor, the sick, the uninformed: covered with tiny red bumps, they are stubbornly threatened by “slum lords” not to say anything to anyone, including the health department and the building inspectorate. If knowledge of your itchy skin and possible symptoms of deteriorating mental health (which bed bugs have been shown to cause) will be evicted.
Where’s Al Vaughters, a consumer defense advocate on TV, when we need him most?
To the thousands who have this problem, stop paying your rent. It’s your only defense in Lockport. Tell everything to the honest, reputable dish.
Some landlords have unscrupulous “ties” to the city (even county) government who could simply “lose” their complaint about this endless scourge because the identified landlords have to pay between $ 2,000 and $ 4,000 for qualified personnel to post checks and expenses to eliminate extermination and ensure exterminators.
It is cheaper to drive away the uninformed tenants than to fight the endless infestation. Earn more money on first / last month rent by guillotining tenants like the French Revolution. What do you call yourselves Christians?
You should be pretty worried.
These bugs are almost impossible to kill. Certain landlords are so well versed in tenant abuse that they may qualify for the old Losers of the Year awards. They say they know the law. Funny, the law says that such manipulative landlords will have to place tenants in local hotels during the poison eradication process.
In an apartment building like the one you find in High, Genesee, South, Washburn, John, Waterman, Pine, and many other houses dating back to the 1880s, the infestation is so dire that the same bloodsuckers can be found anywhere in town eaten if just one bug is transferred (they bounce) on your clothes while waiting in line at the bank or grocery store.
Don’t blame the poor, but blame your city council for ignoring obnoxious landlord problems.
Covid is dying, let’s imagine. But the bed bug thrives in Lockport. Look now – there may just be a transferred bed bug under your crisp Oxford shirt.
Perhaps it is time the greedy landlords involved in the local bed bug conspiracy were brought to justice for their crimes and misdemeanors.
If you own a home, it already needs maintenance every year. So why are so many of these historic buildings shamelessly rotting before our eyes? Landlord, clean up your many metaphorical backyards.
Manipulating and lying to welfare recipients, those who have suffered economically from Covid, and those who do not know how to defend themselves (welted arms) is a perpetual Judas train – empty and as repulsive as the insects you illegally hide. Break the law.
The Niagara Health Department should keep local numbers on bedbug infestation as we did for those infected during the height of Covid. Publish names of owners of infested buildings? A great idea. Do you warn the unsuspecting? Get out of here!
Union-Sun & Journal writer Brandon M. Stickney lives in Lockport.
