Carling residents deal with bed bugs
Renters complain infestation not properly handled by management
Residents at a Carling Avenue apartment building are sleepless and anxious due to a bedbug infestation they say hasn’t been properly handled by management.
Tenants at 2045 Carling Ave., one of two buildings on the Somerset Towers property next to the Carlingwood Mall, say they’re concerned about what they’ve described as a lack of communication on the part of the landlord about an ongoing bedbug outbreak.
“I have nightmares about it every night,” said Mark Legault. The 35-year-old said he sees a counsellor and takes anxiety medication to curb the panic attacks he gets from thinking about sleeping in his apartment.
He even ended his lease early and is currently staying with a friend in Barrhaven.
“It gets inside your head,” said Legault, who found bedbugs in his apartment at the beginning of June, after a preventive spray of his apartment failed to keep them out.
“Your bed is where you sleep. It’s where you rest. It’s where you go to get away from everything — to have the bugs there, it’s a psychological thing that messes with a lot of people,” he said.
Residents who spoke to the Citizen believe the problem started in April, but a June 26 memo marked the first time management communicated the problem to all tenants, they say.
“Up until (then), they had given zero information,” said Legault. “They weren’t telling other tenants that there was a bedbug problem. They weren’t saying what to watch out for. They weren’t saying what to do.”
Stuart Ages of Paramount Properties, the company that owns the Somerset Towers and 26 other Ottawa apartment buildings, said the bedbug problem is “under control” and will be resolved in the “very near future.”
He said it’s up to tenants to report bedbugs so that management can contain them quickly.
“We’ve taken an aggressive approach as soon as we heard about it,” he said. “Understandably people are upset, but the problem is that management didn’t create
when the problem, the tenants did. All we can do is react as quickly as possible and solve it, at a serious cost.”
Ages estimated that 10 apartments were affected. Tenants said there are likely more.
One woman said she felt management was dishonest with her when on June 11 she found bedbugs in her home and inquired further.
Marie-Eve Carrière, 29, said the landlord dodged her questions about the outbreak, and pressed further, told her he hadn’t received complaints. Cases reported by tenants and on bedbugregistry.com predate Carrière’s inquiry, she said. The landlord also said the bedbugs were only in one end of the building, said Carrière, when she knew that wasn’t the case.
“They don’t actually understand the full scope of the issue,” she said.
Somerset Towers’ property manager was unavailable to comment.
Another woman, who asked not to be named, said she only learned of the building’s bedbug problem when she woke up two weeks ago with bites all over her body.
“We were kept in the dark,” she said. “This probably could have been contained earlier had they taken swifter and deeper action.”
According to John Dickie of the Eastern Ontario Landlord Organization, standard practice is to not broadcast information about infestations to all tenants unless the problem has become widespread. That’s not the case at the 250-unit Somerset Towers, he said.
“With an infestation of that size, in that size of a building, the norm is not to freak out other people by telling people that there’s this problem,” said Dickie.
Tenants say they would have preferred to know sooner. It has cost each of them hundreds of dollars to deal with the infestation, they say, not to mention the furniture and other items many of them have thrown in the garbage. That might spread infestation, Legault worries, with some passersby taking what look like “perfectly usable” items in the trash back to their homes.
Carrière said she also worries about spreading the bedbugs to the new house she and her husband plan to buy in the next few weeks.
“The fact that we risk bringing this over to our new house is a huge anxiety for us,” she said.
Ages said it’s “unfair” to blame a bedbug problem on the landlord.
“This isn’t a Somerset Towers problem,” he said.
“This is a North American phenomenon that we unfortunately have to be dealing with, because we had a couple tenants that brought it in, as well as others, that didn’t tell us about the problem fast enough.”
He said he’s been empathetic about the situation at his company’s Carling property.
“I put myself in the shoes of the residents every single day,” he said.