who is liable to pay for bedbug treatment?

March 23, 2009 10:50 PM

who's liable for bedbug treatment in san francisco? are we really liable to pay this bill and can we get our deposit back?

hello internet. We got bedbugs a few weeks ago, and our landlord treated it after they kept saying no one else in the building complained, and blaming us for bringing them in. they never said anything about us having to pay, but we just got a huge bill for treatment and a letter saying that "the probability someone in your apartment introduced the bedbugs to your apartment is just about 99.9%"

There was nothing about payment discussed or any agreement that we signed agreeing to this, and this bill totally came out of nowhere.

anyone know what our rights here are? Are we legally liable to pay this? If we try to fight this, can they withold our deposit or otherwise get back at us?

Thanks!

posted by I like to eat meat to law & government (7 comments total)

Hi there, I like to eat meat. My condolences -- my wife (then girlfriend) and I had an infestation of bedbugs when we lived in Boston three years ago, and I know how horrific they can be. I hope you've gotten through it well.

First of all: this sounds a bit like the landlord let anger get to his head and is trying to bully you into paying for something. Evidence for the sources of bedbugs is notoriously hard to find, as any exterminator worth his salt will tell you; we're talking about invisible creatures that can live in tiny crevices for years without activity. Landlords have a tendancy to freak out and assume they know everything that goes on in an apartment, but I guarantee you that if your landlord asked an exterminator, he'd be told that it's not as simple as he'd like to think -- anyone can walk in and bring bedbugs with them, they can come from other parts of the building, and some people just don't show the bites. My wife would wake up every morning covered with welts, and my skin would be clear. We're pretty sure the previous tenants had the bedbugs, too; they just didn't know they did, because the bites didn't show as strongly on them.

However, second, you also don't mention whether there is any evidence one way or the other. Did you find any furniture on the street and bring it home, or did you buy furniture at a thrift shop? Have you stored anything large, dark and soft in your apartment that had been in another living space unknown to you before? Did this problem with the bedbugs occur soon after you moved in, or a year or more after? The answers to these questions can't yield a conclusive answer, but they are indicators of whether you brought the bedbugs with you or not. I'm guessing you didn't, since you didn't mention it.

Understand this: you landlord sounds as though he's under a very false impression of bedbugs and how they work. Bedbugs are chronically underreported; there may be many tenants in the building who have them and yet are not reporting them out of shame or out of misdiagnosis or purely because they don't know they have them. Since bedbugs can last so long between outbreaks, every outbreak seems like it came in with whoever last showed up, but this is often not the case, as the bedbugs may well simply have been hibernating in cracks in the floors and walls. Because of this, you don't 'prove' that a particular person brought in the germs by process of elimination, i.e. 'well, nobody else brought it in, so it must have been you!' The only way to even approach certainty about this kind of thing is to have some solid theory about a possible source; suspect furniture, and especially suspect mattresses, is the most likely culprit. Your landlord's '99.9%' figure is inane, and not backed up by the opinion of any professional, I'm certain.

Gather any evidence you have -- copies of any correspondence between you and your landlord, photos of the apartment and descriptions of where you got your furniture, et cetera -- and get in touch with The Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco. In fact, read that linked page; your landlord has a responsibility to keep your apartment pest-free; this is called an implied warranty of habitability.

Now, as I said above, the tricky part is that your landlord is firing back, claiming that this is your fault and demanding that you pay for damage that you have inflicted on his apartment building. But (again) I doubt sincerely that he has any grounds to do so; this is likely just intimidation.

If you get in touch with the Housing Rights Committee, I'm sure they'll have an idea of what to do. It seems to me that you have a pretty clear set of options: first, notify the landlord in writing that you likely weren't the source of the outbreak, have evidence to the effect, and therefore won't be paying for the extermination. Second, if he gets angry and threatens eviction or legal action, be ready to hire a lawyer, but stand firm. He doesn't have a leg to stand on, and he knows it; he's just trying to scare you into coughing up.

Unless, of course, you found your mattress in a dumpster somewhere. But even in that case I sincerely doubt that he can prove that you brought them in.
posted by koeselitz at 12:34 AM on March 24 [2 favorites]

a letter saying that "the probability someone in your apartment introduced the bedbugs to your apartment is just about 99.9%"

Save this letter. It may be useful later (if you have to fight for your deposit, or for rent you don't owe because your landlord has failed to provide effective pest control).

Otherwise, what koeselitz said.
posted by oaf at 4:54 AM on March 24

Give the folks at the San Francisco Tenants Union a call, as well. Good luck.
posted by rtha at 6:10 AM on March 24

The landlord shouldn't be assuming that because no one else has complained, no one else is infested. Some people may be reluctant to report it because of this very reason--they don't want to pay for treatment--and are trying home remedies or just hoping it will go away. Or they may not have noticed yet--bugs don't bite all people all the time, and the first few times, one might think it's just a mosquito or something. It's only been a few weeks, you say. And if anyone else IS infested, without proper treatment they'll spread further, including making a comeback for you.

At any rate--he should be asking, not assuming. He should want to head this off at the pass, because the more apartments get infested at his property, the harder time he'll have in the future. This information gets out.

Furthermore, if you're next to a building owned by someone else, there's no reason the bugs couldn't have crawled from there. Even if you are the first apartment in the building with this problem, it's not necessarily because of anything you've done. As koeselitz says, it could have even begun with the previous tenants--they could have moved out in part because of the bugs, they went latent for a while, then came back. They can disappear for a LONG time and still come back.
posted by lampoil at 7:23 AM on March 24

Tenants Union.

Ask the landlord for a letter with that "99.9%" figure in it from an actual exterminator. I'd bet they can't get it. Bedbugs are insidious vile little creatures that can hibernate for ever and seem to have the ability to teleport.
posted by Ookseer at 11:12 AM on March 24

By the way, it's worth knowing why he's acting the way he is. In many states, if bedbugs are found in more than one apartment, the whole building has to be fumigated; and bedbugs are notoriously difficult (perhaps impossible) to get rid of, at least without DDT. If he sits and thinks about this the wrong way, it'll look to him as though he's about to lose a very large amount of money. He's probably also very worried about having rumors spread around the building about bedbugs and tenants running like rats from a sinking ship. I honestly have a hard time thinking of a worse problem for a landlord to deal with; even major structural repairs can get finished and you know they're finished. The repercussions from a major bedbug infestation can keep a building unrentable for years; that's the food on his table.

But that's not your fault, and he needs to remember that. We all take risks in life. He has no right to take it out on you just because he's staring a worrisome situation in the face. I have a feeling the best-case scenario will involve you calmly but firmly reminding him somehow of that fact: that he has no legal grounds to back you into a corner and demand payment just because he's concerned about his bottom line, and if the whole "you brought the bedbugs" crap is some sort of latent threat, a la "if this causes trouble for me down the line, I'm coming after you," well, that's not kosher at all.
posted by koeselitz at 11:41 AM on March 24

Thanks everyone for all the great help, everyone!

I know that bedbugs can come from anywhere, but I don't think the landlord knows. He has previously tried to refuse to pay for treatment, and is not interested in being educated about bedbugs or, seemingly, concerned about protecting the value of his building.

My current solution is to vikane gas all my belongings in a uhaul truck and move out ASAP - I am not really interested in fighting the landlord and the bugs to continue to live in this apartment since I was planing to move out soon anyways. I am just trying to figure out how to avoid paying this massive treatment bill and get my deposit back.

I think the only way the landlord will back down, return my deposit, and take responsibility for the bill for the treatment that has already occurred is if I can reference some sort of law or city ordinance specifically citing his legal responsibility (or at least absolving me of legal responsibility) in order to twist his arm into returning my deposit.

Does the landlord have to prove that I brought them in (which I agree would be almost impossible to do) in order to legally keep my deposit and stick me with this bill? If so, if you all could point me towards some sort of reference that I can use for leverage, that would be very helpful.

Also, for what it's worth, I have not brought any used furniture into the apartment (although of course that is almost impossible to prove either in his favor or mine), and we still have the bugs after the 2 questionable treatments that we were just billed for.

posted by I like to eat meat at 1:31 PM on March 24