Lorain Metropolitan Housing Authority opens bedbug treatment room at Lakeview Plaza

LORAIN — Lorain Metropolitan Housing Authority hopes to combat a growing problem in its high-rise units with a new treatment facility at Lakeview Plaza. Lakeview Plaza, 310 W. Seventh St., is the first Lorain Metropolitan Housing Authority high-rise to receive a heat treatment room for bedbugs. Bedbugs can spread rapidly in high-rise apartments because the units are so close together. Before the heat room, treating infestations meant telling residents to discard belongings — soft items like clothes or bigger furniture like mattresses and couches — and allow Terminix to treat an apartment, LMHA CEO Judy Carlin and Chief Operating Officer Gale Sayers Proby explained. The Cleveland-Akron metro area has the fourth-highest incident rate for bedbugs in U.S. cities, according to a 2023 Orkin report, with Lorain included in the Cleveland-Akron metro area. LMHA's new, roughly 270-square-foot heat treatment room allows housing authority staff to place a resident's belongings, including furniture, and heat the items to between 140 and 130 degrees for four hours, killing any bed bugs and eggs on the items. Meanwhile, Terminix will treat infested apartments while the residents' furniture and belongings are in the heat treatment room to kill any bedbugs there. Removing items from an apartment will allow Terminix to better treat the apartment itself, Josh Green said. Green is LMHA's account manager at Terminix. Green said bedbugs are one of the biggest issues in high-rise apartments, while roaches and ants are more prevalent in family-style units like those at Wilkes Villa or Leavitt Homes. "Right now sometimes residents have a lot of items in a small apartment, it's hard to get the heaters in to do that now," Green said. "Having this is going to be huge — those items can be brought down here, allowing our equipment to take care of the unit itself." The treated items are then sprayed down with alcohol as another sanitizer and returned to the cleaned apartment. An infested apartment and the eight units surrounding it— on either side and above and below — will also be treated to fully eradicate a bedbug outbreak in the high-rise apartment, Sayers Proby said. Felipe Vasquez, LMHA building systems and capital needs manager, said the heat treatment room can accommodate about three apartments' worth of furniture at a time. LMHA expects the first residents' items will be treated in the next week or so. The housing authority is the first in the area to use an on-site heat treatment room, Green said, and hoped others would take note to help control bedbugs in high-rise apartments. The treatments will be done at no cost to residents; LMHA staff will move furniture and other belongings between a resident's apartment and the treatment room. It will also be used on any furniture brought into the property, Sayers Proby said. So if a resident gets a new couch that may have bedbugs in it, that infested piece of furniture will not wreak havoc on an entire wing for the 144-unit building. "This is a major investment for the housing authority," she said. "We're hoping that within our high-rises we can control — we won't be able to eradicate it, we will never be able to eradicate bedbugs within our buildings, but we can at least get it under control." Carlin agreed, adding it is about layering processes to keep the vermin in check. "LMHA invests about $500,000 in pest control," Carlin said. "We're going to be the first public housing authority to install a heat treatment room, but this is all part of an integrated pest management plan — we do inspections, we do treatments — but this is another tool we hope will help us get control of it." The treatment room at Lakeview Plaza cost just under $400,000 and took about 18 months to complete. A larger room is planned for Kennedy Plaza, 1730 Broadway, that will be just shy of $760,000. LMHA awarded a contract for the work at Kennedy in February. Eventually, LMHA plans to have another heat treatment facility at Wilkes Villa — where another $40 million in upgrades are planned — and to serve Leavitt Homes, Westview Terrace and Westgate apartments. Upgrades are also planned for those west side complexes. "They're investments to improve our residents' living conditions and the quality of their lives," Sayers Proby said. Victoria Kempton, D-2nd Ward, lauded LMHA for investing in the treatment room. Lakeview Plaza is in her ward. "This is something that is a day-to-day, quality of life issue," she said. "There are a lot of issues that residents of LMHA can have, but this one is the one that somebody may choose not to go someplace because they're afraid a bedbug is going to fall off of them, so then they become isolated and they become depressed … It's a wonderful thing you're doing to prevent or potentially control something that can be very personal to someone." Of Lakeview Plaza's 144 units, about 134 are occupied. Of those, Green identified 40 units that will go through the heat treatment process. Alongside offering the heat treatment room, LMHA will be educating residents on what to do if they have bedbugs in their unit. Sayers Proby and Green cautioned that residents should not try to self-treat the problem and instead contact LMHA staff. Self-treatment can cause the bugs to spread, or can put residents or their children in contact with dangerous chemicals, Green said. "This is a game changer," Carlin said. Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.