Bedbugs happen. Just like your son might come home from school once with lice or you might find a mouse in your kitchen or your cat drags fleas into the house, pests are for most, a rare nuisance. From 2011 to present, bedbugs have been reported throughout Hartford, from streets like Kenyon, Fairfield, and Cornwall, to Marshall, Wethersfield, and Farmington. They have been reported in single-family homes, high rises, and churches. But what does it mean when some properties have multiple incidents in one year, or year after year?
Although the information is public, we are not interested in embarrassing property owners who had one unlucky occurrence. Instead, we are going to look at some patterns. These reports are divided into those with two or three violations in one year (these are considered housing code violations) and those with four or more in one year.
In some cases, the repeat offenders involved just one unit of a larger building, but in other cases the problem affected public hallways in buildings with multiple dwelling units. When a property owner with multiple properties had multiple violations, or when there might be public interest in a location that had been affected, we named those owners.
What we found: it was rare for a single-family home to have multiple violations and also rare for this to happen in an owner-occupied building.
Our information is as accurate as what is provided by the City of Hartford, but we know that this is incomplete. There is a property on Capitol Avenue, for instance, that we know has had bedbugs for months on end, but is not listed in the database.
2011
2012
2013
2014
(This is for January through mid-August 2014)
To see a pattern, look at this map of all properties with multiple bedbug violations 2011 through 2013.
The chart below provides information about owners, construction date, construction materials, and number of units in buildings with multiple bedbug violations. Those with no owner information indicate that the owner has no LLC or other business or non-profit entity formed.
The map below does not imply causation. We simply thought it worth looking at what else was happening in and on the properties with the largest number of bedbug violations. Just as in the Police in the Parks piece, we need to remind readers that no police incidents on a property does not necessarily mean nothing happened there; it is possible that something did, but had not been reported.