Griego: Halcyon House offers no calm for residents

Thursday, June 21, 2007

My friend Dave calls. "Did you see Steve's building was in the paper?"

"Yeah," I say. "Let's go see him."

We meet in front of the building, 16 stories, 197 rooms, most occupied by low-income disabled and elderly people. The Halcyon House, it's called. My dictionary says "halcyon" is a word associated with calm, but nothing about this place is tranquil. The apartment building stands in a rough-and-tumble part of downtown, near the bus station.

The first time I visited the Halcyon, Dave told me not to go in alone. I remember thinking, oh, it can't be that bad. It is. The street seeps into the building on a regular basis, rattling the doorknobs of tenants, checking for unlocked doors, leaving urine in the stairwells.

We find Steve in his usual spot, in bed. Hey, Dave says, scanning a note from management, you can't use the emergency doors to get in and out of the building anymore.

I'll make a note of that, Steve says. He's paralyzed from the neck down, can't feel a thing from his Adam's apple south. Quadzilla, he calls himself. He turns on the lights, the fan, the television and stereo with a plastic straw. Puff or sip. With his breath, he controls his environment.

During the day, he has home health care aides. At night, he is alone. He was helpless when bedbugs infesting his building found his bed. He felt them crawling in his hair, on his neck, his face. He lay there and the bugs bit. It was like being stuck with pins, he says.

"I was scared," he tells me and Dave. "I wanted a blowtorch. I wanted to die."

It went on, some months worse than others, for a year and a half.

Maybe you read the story Dave was talking about. Halcyon House management was cited for failing to maintain pest control. The building has had bedbugs for years. The company, Urban Inc., said the owners, Maine- based American Housing Preservation Corp., ran into a cash shortage. The hearing was reset for next week so the owner's lawyers could attend.

It's the kind of story that had me wishing a judge would order the owners to live in the apartments themselves.

A merry-go-round of finger-pointing is under way, but here are two points worth considering. First, in the words of public health inspector Ray Brewer, there is an "epidemic" of bedbugs in the city. The bugs can be an indomitable foe, especially in high-rise, high-traffic buildings.

The second is that in Halcyon's case, the bugs are symptomatic of bigger issues. A tenant group has a litany of complaints about lax security, the loss of free parking and old elevators that have stopped working too many times for a building full of people in wheelchairs.

Steve used to sleep with his door unlocked because he feared being trapped in his apartment. A few years ago, he says he was awakened by a man demanding drugs. He lay there while the man took his VCR and some TV dinners. Steve locks his door now, but, he says, sometimes at night he can hear people testing the knob. "This place is like Peyton Place, man, only for real."

Urban's managing director, Mark Shulman, acknowledges the Halcyon has problems and says the owners are working on them. He says the building "has faced some pretty serious financial needs" in the last two years and pest control ran the owners $15,000 a month. The owner cannot easily raise rents to cover rising costs because the building is taxpayer-subsidized.

Spraying resumed in mid-May on a twice-weekly schedule after nearly a month's hiatus. Shulman says the owners also have been negotiating a rent increase with government agencies for more security. "We will have uniformed personnel in the building 2 4/7," he says.

At the Colorado Housing and Financing Authority, spokesperson Kristine McLain also acknowledges "ongoing concerns" with the Halcyon and says her agency is working with the owners. "In a perfect world, you close down the building," she says, "but . . .

We finish the sentence at the same time: ". . . where would the tenants go?"

Dave and I visited Steve on Tuesday, a spraying day. He didn't answer his intercom to buzz us in, so we walked in the way most people do, slipping past a departing tenant. The lobby was empty save for a resident who shot us a disapproving look. We signed in on a clipboard outside the closed office.

Steve was in good spirits. Someone sprayed his room a few weeks ago, and it's made a difference. He's also regularly dousing his bed, which has a vinyl mattress, with Real-kill bug killer.

"The whole thing took a lot out of me," he said. "But I consider myself one of the lucky ones in the building. Some people here can't communicate at all. Think about them."

He told us to make sure and check our clothes after we left. "Bedbugs like to burrow in fabric."

That night, I imagined I felt bugs in my hair. My arms itched. I thought a lot about Steve.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com