Permeable homes: A historical political ecology of insects and pesticides in US public housing

Geoforum 40 (2009) 1014–1023

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Permeable homes: A historical political ecology of insects and pesticides in US public housing Dawn Day Biehler Department of Geography and Environmental Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 211 Sondheim Hall, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA

a r t i c l e

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Article history: Received 7 August 2008 Received in revised form 7 July 2009

Keywords: Public housing Insects Pesticides Urban political ecology Environmental health Domestic space United States

a b s t r a c t This paper traces changes in the political ecology of insects and chemicals in US public housing since Congress founded public housing in 1937. Drawing upon the literature of critical geographies of home, urban political ecology, and medical history, it argues that the constitution of ‘‘public” and ‘‘private” space within public housing was deeply entangled with pest control practices there. Prior to 1945, reformers treated the housing as a commons, in part compelled by the mobility of bedbugs and the pesticide used to combat them, both of which were seen as serious health threats. Managers were also motivated by social welfare ideologies, while residents eagerly assisted with communal control policies in order to achieve freedom from the health insults of bedbugs. Following 1945, however, new synthetic pesticides like DDT seemed to stay safely within one apartment unit, encouraging housing managers to abandon community-oriented pest control practices. Meanwhile, curtailed budgets, particularly after the Housing Act of 1949, left the infrastructure of public housing to decay, rendering units more physically permeable even as managers neglected the communities there. The new pesticides nearly eradicated bedbugs, but tenacious populations of German cockroaches blossomed thanks to the permeable buildings and synthetic pesticides. Residents grew increasingly resistant to pesticide use as they observed that cockroach populations went unabated. The paper serves as a case for applying political ecology frameworks to domestic spaces, and also argues that housing quality and domestic pesticide use are not merely private responsibilities but should be regarded as environmental justice issues. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In the mid-1990s, amid a struggle to protect their homes from threats of demolition, residents of a Chicago public housing community also took dramatic steps to demand a healthier domestic ecology. For decades the state had allowed the physical structure of Henry Horner Homes to crumble – much as in other projects across the US – exposing residents to daily safety and health hazards like burst water pipes and severe drafts during cold Chicago winters (Popkin et al., 2000; Ruffin, 2006). In 1995, the womenled residents’ council demanded not only that the state preserve their homes, but also that it address one of the most persistent environmental problems there: the project’s tenacious cockroach population. Although we might think of these insects as a mere nuisance, and their control merely a private responsibility, the abundance of German cockroaches in public and private low-income housing over the past several decades is actually linked with serious public health problems, most notably asthma and exposure to pesticides (Rosenstreich et al., 1997; Landrigan et al., 1999). Only by demanding public reinvestment in the housing environment and support for community management were the women of Henry Horner able to curtail both cockroaches and pesticide E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.08.004

use. In doing so they re-framed the ecology of home as a concern transcending the private sphere. In recent years, resident protests, advocacy campaigns, and even lawsuits have demanded that US housing authorities protect residents’ environmental health as Chicago’s did (Krieger and Higgins, 2002; State of New York, 2004). But housing authorities did not always require legal and political goading to shield residents from pests and pesticides. Furthermore, the growth of German cockroach (Blattella germanica) populations since 1945 in many multi-family dwellings, public and private, was not an inevitability of urban life. This paper traces historical shifts in ideologies, policies, and technological practices that shaped and were shaped by insect ecologies in US public housing. In examining this history, I argue for a political ecology of domestic space. Although political ecologists have seldom examined environmental issues in domestic space, or even in indoor settings, this paper shows that these sites, seemingly divorced from nature, actually constitute fertile ground for study. Pest control is an apt arena for examining the political ecology of the home because housing managers’ choice of policies and technologies, and the state’s relationship with residents, have had distinct impacts on insect fauna and the human body. In fact, I will show that housing

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policies and management practices encouraged the growth of roach populations in part by denying that indoor space was subject to what Castree (2002) has called nature’s ‘‘unpredictable and lively agency.” This paper also argues that the political ecology of domestic space provides an apt case for questioning the ‘‘private” home as a pre-given scale. Namely, different insects, pesticide technologies, and housing policies hailed social actors to treat the home as a public responsibility at some points in history, and a private responsibility at other times. While I work primarily within a political ecology framework, I draw upon the literature of critical geographies of home because of the latter’s concern for the public versus private status of the realm of social reproduction. Just as cockroaches and pesticides permeated the buildings of Henry Horner Homes, so I will argue that the physical and social permeability of all domestic spaces should lead us to question the notion of ‘‘private” responsibility for environmental health problems there. In order to capture key changes in the management of domestic nature in public housing, this paper takes a historical approach, focusing on a shift between two defining eras in the political ecology of insects and insecticides in public housing, and the consequences that followed that shift. After a brief section that situates domestic space within the political ecology literature and draws connections to critical geographies of home, the first historical section begins at the origins of US public housing in the late 1930s, when ‘‘public” was clearly the guiding principle of pest management there. The second historical section examines shifts in policies and practices begun in 1945 that brought a new ‘‘private” ethos to pest management in public housing. A third historical section traces the gradual unfolding of a new indoor political ecology from changes set in motion in 1945, including the actions of the Henry Horner Homes residents’ council. Overall, the paper traces four material and ideological factors tied to the political ecology of insects and insecticides in public housing projects (Table 1). Responsibility for pest control shifted from public to private, shaping and shaped by changes in these four factors: (1) the political economy of public housing as dictated by federal policies; (2) prevailing pest control chemicals and practices; (3) the pest species of concern to managers and residents; and (4) residents’ perspectives on management practices. Empirically, the paper draws primarily upon historical publications of the National Association of Housing Officials (NAHO), the professional organization of subsidized housing managers in the US. In addition, it uses historical documents about domestic pest control by entomologists, public health authorities, and professional pest controllers to further triangulate on the often-elusive spaces of multi-family housing. Insofar as public housing is a national system governed by a common set of policies and budgetary constraints and sharing common discourses and environmental management methods, my findings apply across cities. Cities in the Northeastern and Midwestern US particularly share similar climatic conditions for the insects in question. The Journal of Housing,

the official publication of NAHO, contains management advice and notices of pest control programs that were applied across the entire US. I do, however, focus as much as possible on two housing authorities that have left workable records of their pest control activities: Chicago and Baltimore. For the more recent events, I have conducted semi-structured oral histories with a small number of key actors involved with pest control in public housing in these two cities. 2. Domestic space as fertile ground for political ecology In spite of political ecologists’ growing interest in urban and industrial socio-natures, few have examined indoor spaces, much less domestic space (Gandy, 2002; Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003; Desfor and Keil, 2004; Heynen et al., 2006). Yet, like other landscapes and scales that political ecologists do study, the home environment is socially-produced amid struggles over public and private management (Swyngedouw, 1999; Marston, 2000). The seeming given-ness of home as a distinct scale masks the political processes that have cleaved private spaces from the public realm. Conceived as a kind of commons, public housing has since its founding been the target of calls for privatization, not unlike calls for market-based management of natural resources. Some of the founding literature of political ecology challenged the narrative of a ‘‘tragedy of the commons,” which blamed peasants for degrading communal lands (Blaikie, 1985). Similarly, conservatives (and lately, neoliberals) have criticized public housing as a resource degraded by residents with no sense of individual responsibility, an accusation that ignores the public policies that ensured the decline of environmental quality there (Hackworth, 2003). Thus a political ecology lens helps reveal the role of the state, capital, and citizens in rearticulating domestic space as a public or private issue. Furthermore, political ecology can help reveal how the ostensibly stable and bounded sphere of the home actually helps constitute a network of unruly non-humans, a network that also engages the unruly human body. Although nature there seems subdued, applying a political ecology lens to home environments unsettles assumptions about the home’s independence by revealing that nature transcends the socially-produced boundaries between public and private space (Kaika, 2004, 2005). In fact, the physical dwelling itself is more dynamic than it appears, helping to constitute domestic socio-natural networks (Latour, 2004; Braun, 2005). Furthermore, as health geographers have recently shown, human bodies engaged in such networks bear the brunt of the physical degradation of the home (Smith et al., 1991; Smith, 2004). Indeed, domestic space and its unruly non-human inhabitants have often had unexpected effects on human health (Mitman, 2007). Robbins (2007) has shown how turfgrasses just beyond the domestic threshold possess ecological characteristics that hail humans to manage them by means they might not otherwise choose. Examining the body and the agency of non-humans thus leads us to problematize notions of the stable, bounded, private home. Con-

Table 1 Shifts in four factors that shape the political ecology of insects and chemicals in US public housing. General time period

Political economy of public housing

Pest control chemicals and practices

Pests of concern

Resident relationships with management

Pre-1945

Emphasis on investment in housing as a public good to support well-being following the Housing Act of 1937

Hydrocyanic acid gas (HCN) fumigation at scale of whole project

Bedbugs (Cimex lectularius)

Residents eager to claim benefits of public housing; cooperate with communal pest control

Post-1945

Declining budgets for construction, maintenance, and community services especially after the Housing Act of 1949

Organochloride and organophosphate residual sprays at scale of individual unit

German cockroaches (Blattella germanica)

Residents critical of management practices; resist pest control interventions or demand more

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cern for the unpredictable effects of non-humans in the home is not new, and in fact Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) raised such concerns during part of the historical period I examine. The small number of nature-society geographers who have addressed the home have emphasized the ways the state and citizens produce domestic space and its borders. Robbins (2007) shows how pesticides applied outdoors, as demanded by both grass itself and public expectations, can cross the threshold of the house to create an unsafe domestic environment. Kaika’s (2004, 2005) examination of household water technologies reveals how modernization projects purport to separate domestic realms from nature and the public. Crabtree (2006) explores the ways ecofeminist urban design can embrace a more permeable vision of environment and citizenship by rearranging the architectural and social borders of domestic space. Moran (2008) raises the possibility of material engagement between the often-isolated home space and the larger process of the water cycle. In scrutinizing the production of home, we find that the cleavage of domestic space from nature and the public realm is not only a problematic political act, it also ignores the movements of non-humans such as water, or, in this case, insects and pesticides. The emerging literature on critical and feminist geographies of home shares key theoretical terrain with nature-society geographies. Smith (2004) has already suggested a path for engagement between these literatures by calling for research on the materiality of the home. Such research would allow us to ‘‘weav[e] mice, mites, and moulds into woods and wools, through airways and organs, between bodies, onto scientific instruments, and into political imaginations” (Smith, 2004: 90). The critical geographies of home literature has done much to address such ‘‘imaginations,” particularly with reference to the production of the home as private sphere. Homes have been shaped by normative assumptions that women perform social reproductive labor for autonomous, private family units, and that ‘‘public” homes were somehow deviant (Domosh, 1998; Vale, 2000; Blunt and Dowling, 2006). In fact, many of the social reproduction activities associated with the home were once far more communal, and only became private through historically-specific practices and discourses, including the deployment of certain domestic technologies (Wright, 1981; Strasser, 1982; Miller, 1991; Watkins, 2006; but see also Marston, 2000). This paper shows how residents, often led by women, cooperated and struggled with managers over the use of pest control technologies that redefined the relationship between the state and citizens – with dire health implications.

3. Pest control as communal responsibility: bedbugs, fumigation, and housing, pre-1945 The Housing Act of 1937 promised that the state would protect citizens from unhealthy home environments with Progressive visions of ‘‘decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings for families of low income” (Wurster, 1934; Radford, 1996; Hall, 2002). Many early managers believed they could maintain ideal living conditions by building cohesive communities. To be certain, these ideals came tinged with troubling ideologies and practices: managers discriminated against applicants who they feared would taint the community, and kept mothers under surveillance of nurses and social workers to uphold standards of modern homemaking (Williams, 2004). But managers also used public funds to create new collectivities – communal spaces and services. Subsidies enabled poor families to share in sound design that would otherwise remain out of reach. Youth groups, parenting classes, and health clinics benefited families while imposing middle-class values (Chicago Daily Tribune, 1938; Goldfeld, 1938; Vale, 2000). Public housing thus embodied a tension between benign socialism and disciplinary social control.

The founding ideals of public housing – collectivity and mainstream notions of decency – along with the characteristics of existing pests and pesticides, informed the pest control choices of early public housing managers. Hailed by pests and pesticides that they knew were difficult to control, the founding cohort of managers, along with the first residents, deliberately produced public housing as a communal space, taking responsibility for an often-ignored aspect of domestic labor, pest control. Recognizing the projects’ ecological permeability, managers and residents cooperated to use federal and local funds to rid projects of pests they considered unhealthy. Their communal pest control programs also strived to eliminate health and safety threats from pesticides. In homes that new public housing residents left behind, neglect by private landlords and public health inspectors created a political ecology favorable to infestation by rats, mice, cockroaches, and bedbugs (Abbott and Breckenridge, 1936). Along with other threats to well-being such as tuberculosis, the bedbug symbolized the unsanitary and unhealthy conditions from which public housing would deliver the poor. Of course, to residents bedbugs were much more than symbols: they severely disrupted the realm of social reproduction, draining residents’ health. These bloodsuckers brought unyielding stress and skin eruptions to infested households (Wright, 1944). One health official noted, ‘‘many individuals are so susceptible to its bites and to its offensive odor that it is impossible for them to sleep in a room in which bedbugs are present” (Hall, 1937). Small children might lose enough blood to become anemic (Harvey and Hill, 1941; Venkatachalam and Belavadi, 1962). Severe infestations left a sour stink and encrusted surfaces with feces, egg cases, exoskeletons, and human blood – stigma that marked poor households (Hartnack, 1939; Sailer, 1952). Public housing could not fulfill its promise if it did not protect the poor from this tiny scourge. Like other pests, bedbugs possessed ecological characteristics that made them a community problem: the species took advantage of human movements to spread rapidly through neighborhoods, and it resisted most control efforts. Bedbugs embodied the shared ecology of neighborhoods, calling into question any notion of an autonomous single-family dwelling. They colonized homes by stowing away on wooden furniture and other belongings that tenants moved from place to place (Hartnack, 1939). Once bedbugs settled in a home, the best a poor family – usually led by the mother – could do to control them was to regularly treat all infested surfaces with kerosene-based sprays. This time-consuming practice killed only nymphs and adults; tough eggs survived to renew the agony, and new introductions constantly replenished adult populations (Wright, 1944; Sailer, 1952). Some officials argued that bedbugs accelerated falling property values as residents unwittingly carried them to neighbors’ dwellings, and as frustrated families abandoned their control efforts (Jervis, 1935). As many as half of the first public housing residents came from infested households. In 1939, the National Association of Housing Officials (NAHO) convened a meeting of managers from across the US to address the bedbug menace. Their report lamented that: If the furnishings of but one family moving into the new building are verminous – the percentage is usually much higher – there is every possibility that the woodwork, cupboards, and fixtures of the apartments will have become infested before the management can bring the condition under control (NAHO, 1939: 4). It was thus, in part, bedbugs’ ability to colonize entire communities that hailed housing authorities to seek collective management approaches. A full accounting of the political ecology of bedbugs pre-1945 requires that we also examine the properties of the only pesticide known to kill bedbug eggs, and access to this technology among

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the poor and the affluent. Bedbugs could strike households of any social class; the question was not so much who could catch bedbugs, but how likely a family was to become infested, and how easily they could achieve permanent relief (Sailer, 1952). While the poor toiled away with kerosene only to watch their neighbors introduce new bugs, higher-income people could avoid infested areas or, failing that, hire an exterminator to perform an expensive and dangerous fumigation. Hydrocyanic acid gas, known in industry as HCN, was the only poison available pre-1945 that could kill bedbug eggs (Back and Cotton, 1932). HCN was also acutely toxic to humans, and it diffused rapidly through buildings.1 Although swift diffusion eliminated chronic exposure to residues, it also meant that residents of densely populated blocks could be exposed to deadly leaks from a fumigation next door. Hundreds of deaths had resulted from accidents in which HCN seeped through unseen crevices in walls between units, and many health officials called for tight restrictions or outright bans on HCN use (Cousineau and Legg, 1935; Williams, 1935). Most US cities limited HCN use to licensed practitioners, who could then charge high fees for their services (Snetsinger, 1983). Public housing managers were eager to bring the benefits of HCN to new residents, but they worried about the poison’s price and its grave dangers. The 1939 NAHO conference overcame the quandary of bedbugs and HCN by sustaining the founding vision of public housing as a collective institution. Managers looked to housing and health authorities in Leeds, Britain for their solution, and an idealistic Chicago official named Sherman Aldrich was the first American to test it (Aldrich, 1938). The seemingly simple Leeds procedure required intricate logistical coordination, along with public and private financial contributions. Each local housing authority subsidized purchase or rental of a safe facility – a sealed chamber off-site, or a specially-designed moving van – in which to perform fumigations. Then, every entering family submitted their belongings for fumigation one day before their scheduled move-in. Every family went through the procedure regardless of their infestation status; Aldrich’s deputy declared, ‘‘the singling out of individual families [for fumigation] carries with it a stigma which would not be socially acceptable” (NAHO, 1939: 25). US officials agreed with their counterparts in Britain that families must not be held responsible for poor environmental conditions in their former housing – particularly given the mobile nature of bedbugs (NAHO, 1939: 27). Like the sustainability practices in the progressive communities Crabtree (2006) examined, the so-called ‘‘disinfestation scheme” produced healthy living conditions by acknowledging the permeability of responsibility and space in public housing. Like other social programs in public housing, fumigation helped establish the projects as a commons, and the social reproduction of health as a public responsibility. Although NAHO recommended nationwide adoption of the Leeds disinfestation scheme, one local housing authority rejected the notion of the public duty to residents’ environmental health. Instead, Milwaukee shifted the burden of expense, danger, and stigma onto tenants, based on the view that tenants were responsible for their own environment. New residents were refused entry until an exterminator certified that they were free from bedbugs (NAHO, 1939: 26). Without the public subsidy on communal fumigation and the safe off-site facility, Milwaukee’s rule could be costly and dangerous for infested households. Private exterminators varied widely in their costs and skills (Exterminators’ Log, 1933; Snetsinger, 1983); families who hired a cheap fumigator exposed their community to risk of poisoning, and might not be free from bedbugs when they moved into public housing. Milwaukee’s

1 One formulation of HCN, called Zyklon-B, later became notorious as the poison with which Nazis carried out the mass killings of the Holocaust.

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anti-collective approach to the housing environment presumed that the scale of the home was isolated and private rather than ecologically interconnected and subject to structural forces. For the residents’ part, the disinfestation scheme was one of many aspects of life in public housing that brought both environmental improvement and sacrifices of privacy – producing home as an ambiguous space (Marston, 2000; Vale, 2000; Williams, 2004). The first generation of public housing residents, particularly the women who were typically responsible for both children’s health and domestic pest control (Hunter, 1938; Hoy, 1995; Tomes, 1990, 1998), knew the stress and stigma of bedbug infestation. As historian Rhonda Williams has explained, this first cohort of residents was eager to cooperate with housing managers in order to enjoy every health benefit the state offered. One paean to public housing quoted a Los Angeles mother who contrasted her ‘‘wonderful” new public unit with her old private apartment, which was ‘‘full of bugs of all kinds. I cleaned and sprayed and it did no good. The children were bitten all the time” (Journal of Housing, 1947c). Other propaganda for public housing also quoted mothers expressing their gratitude for healthy, pest-free homes (New York City Housing Authority, 1961). Thus residents readily assisted with the fumigation program; some told Aldrich, ‘‘this is the best thing you have done with this project” (Aldrich, 1938). These sentiments may have reflected in part residents’ aspirations to middle-class standards of decency; they had internalized modernist discourse of cleanliness (Hoy, 1995; Tomes, 1998). But we cannot ascribe desire for health housing only to the imposition of mainstream standards on subaltern people. Instead, as Rhonda Williams insists, mothers were eager to claim their rights as citizens to public resources that would improve conditions of social reproduction for the sake of their own and their children’s health. As heads or at least managers of the household, mothers were particularly attuned to both the opportunity to protect their families and also the new impositions of outside authority on domestic space. They sacrificed privacy as part of a strategic trade-off to achieve government protection from poor housing conditions (Williams, 2004: 8) – such as persistent bedbug infestation. Thus the words of the Los Angeles mother tell us that living with bedbugs in private housing imposed enormous individual stresses, stresses that the community relieved when one moved in under the state’s roof. For the first generation of public housing residents, cooperation with environmental management in the form of communal fumigation represented a renegotiation of the status of domestic space within a new kind of commons. Bedbugs, the dangers of HCN, and the state marshaled residents to affirm the collective status of their new homes. Prior to 1945, a web of human and non-human factors constituted homes in public housing as communal environments. Given the social aims of housing reformers, the ability of both bedbugs and HCN to permeate homes, and residents’ eagerness to gain the state’s protection from poor living environments, all involved had reason to see public housing communities as unified ecologies in need of collective management. The first cohort of managers turned the problem of physical permeability – to both menacing pests and hazardous pesticides – into an imperative for community pest control. Future officials, however, would manage buildings according to an ideological stance more like that expressed in Milwaukee’s anti-collective policies. Furthermore, housing managers were eager to find pest management technologies that were easier to control than HCN. NAHO’s bedbug report stated that managers would prefer a pesticide ‘‘which is not dangerous to human life and which can be used for individual dwellings without endangering the neighbors” (NAHO, 1939: 8). NAHO’s wish seemed to come true after 1945, when the promise of safe, containable pesticides dovetailed with distinctly less collective policies toward public housing.

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4. Pest control devolves to the dwelling unit: the rise of synthetic pesticides, post-1945 The years immediately following World War II brought dramatic changes to the physical environment of public housing and the constitution of space there. In 1945, DDT and related organochloride pesticides burst onto the civilian market, imbued with the mystique of modern technology and wartime heroism (Russell, 2001). Popular magazines and government publications heralded the ease with which these chemicals would allow ‘‘Mrs. Postwar American” to not just control but obliterate nature in domestic space. These pieces typically assumed that Mrs. Postwar American lived in a detached suburban home, quite different from the environment in public housing (Bartlett, 1945; Public Health Service, 1946). By most accounts, these pesticides did not diffuse like HCN, so housing managers assumed they could now treat individual apartments as bounded units rather than permeable spaces. At the same time, however, federal budgets and local authorities began to withdraw the funding necessary to maintain public housing’s physical infrastructure, letting buildings become even more permeable to pests. Increasingly neglectful management practices and faith in the new pesticides helped constitute new ecologies in public housing. Authorities chose cheap, quick, technical fixes to fend off pests, rather than sustain the founding vision of decent housing for people of low income. The organochlorides that housing managers began using in 1945 differed vastly from HCN, in ways that seemed to render communal pest control unnecessary. Both HCN and DDT could kill a broad range of rodents and insects, including bedbug eggs. HCN could also kill humans within seconds or minutes, but the new chemicals had a low acute toxicity, and worries about chronic toxicity only slowly came to light (President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1963). Furthermore, they seemed to behave quite differently from HCN in indoor space. HCN diffused rapidly and almost uncontrollably through structures, necessitating the evacuation of entire apartment buildings before fumigations. By contrast, DDT acted as a ‘‘residual” pesticide: spraying it on a wall or other surface left a chemical barrier that would kill bugs for several weeks to a few months (Public Health Service, 1946). As far as most scientists knew in 1945, DDT remained safely fixed where applicators sprayed it. DDT was also far cheaper than HCN, and few authorities questioned its availability to untrained users, even as an over-the-counter chemical. Even low-income families could afford a bottle of DDT, with which they could kill all life stages of the bedbug, seemingly free from health risks (Hockenyos, 1946).2 The new chemicals possessed just the properties housing managers had been hoping for. Residual organochloride sprays seemed not only safe to use in a single unit, they also seemed to superimpose chemical barriers over physical walls, bounding off the environment of the unit from adjacent units and the outdoors. Thus in quite material ways, DDT reinforced the notion of the independent scale of the home and even broached the possibility that pest control tasks could be left to individual families. At the very moment when DDT promised to make homes less permeable to pests, however, the physical structures of public housing were becoming more permeable. Facing curtailed budgets after World War II, public housing managers and designers set in motion a process of environmental change favorable to new insect life (Mitman, 2007: 161). Design, construction, and maintenance practices thereafter fell far short of the founding ideal of healthy 2 The so-called ‘‘bedbug resurgence” of the past decade has received considerable press coverage, and I address this recent history of bedbugs elsewhere in the larger project from which this paper is drawn. The press has given little attention to the possibility that bedbugs persisted in the poorest of poor communities, yet such neighborhoods may have served as reservoirs for the current resurgence.

environments in public housing. In effect, the state withdrew the protections so valued by the first cohort of residents and managers, imposing an early version of the neoliberal ‘‘reforms” in place today (Radford, 1996; Hackworth, 2003). These changes ensured that managers and residents could not keep vermin out of homes without the new pesticides – and even those pesticides failed soon enough. The earliest evidence of decay suggests that builders had installed poor-quality construction materials, leaving buildings to become increasingly permeable to a variety of vermin, in spite of a stated commitment to ‘‘decent” housing. Some funding gaps during the Depression and World War II were predictable, and indeed the first local managers complained that screen doors had warped in their frames, allowing ‘‘flies and other insects [to] come right into the houses” (NAHO, 1938). A sharp trend toward disinvestment after the war, however, is notable in light of massive new federal subsidies on private housing. While loans for new (and white) homeowners funded dwellings far from urban pest populations, projects in cities with established infestations of cockroaches, not to mention rats and mice, began to decay. Maintenance staff nationwide criticized deficiencies in the design and condition of the buildings in a 1948 report, and many of the problems they described rendered public housing vulnerable to pests. Poorly-designed garbage receptacles, non-waterproof floors, leaky walls, and rotting window and door sashes could all permit roaches or rats into structures. Staff further testified that vermin could move from unsealed gaps around pipes into crawl spaces and thereby throughout buildings; pests could also gain passage via ‘‘cheap and flimsy” interior partitions between units. Some projects were sited near dumps, ensuring a ready source of rats (NAHO, 1948). The laws that created public housing had promised to protect residents from conditions such as these. The year after the maintenance report exposed these deficiencies, Congress itself withdrew the funding meant to maintain public housing’s promise of decency. The real estate and developer industries had opposed public housing from the start, and with the Housing Act of 1949, Congress caved to their lobbying, sharply curtailing federal support for public homes. Critical geographers of home have examined representations of public housing as deviant (Blunt and Dowling, 2006); the private housing industry lobby helped spread this discourse in the post-war era, with serious material effects (Vale, 2000). By cutting housing funds, Congress pushed responsibility for environmental conditions in public projects back toward the private realm. In effect, representing public housing as deviant helped create environments that did deviate from middle-class norms of decency. The Act provided construction, maintenance, and service budgets that one historian has described as ‘‘miserly” and ‘‘inhumane” (Radford, 1996: 191–192). Just when NAHO had identified maintenance deficiencies, Congress denied housing officials the resources to make improvements. In fact, it ensured that new buildings would be of worse quality than the buildings criticized by maintenance staff. Although the 1949 Act did supply a burst of funding for the construction of new housing projects, the federal government was no longer committed to building and maintaining healthy domestic environments. Their neglect did not result from ignorance, because public health experts had advised managers on the environmental health implications of housing. A working group on the ‘‘hygiene of housing” had formed within the American Public Health Association (APHA), and it argued that health insults such as vermin within the domestic environment threatened residents with infectious disease and other physical and mental stresses (APHA, 1941). Allen Pond, who led efforts to set ‘‘healthy housing standards,” argued that public health needs like vermin control should be addressed through good housing design and construction, especially in apartment buildings where units were closely interconnected with one

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another (APHA, 1946). Pond warned, ‘‘the migration of domestic insect pests between dwelling units in multiple-family housing frequently assumes serious proportions. The main travel routes are along water, heating, power, and drain lines” (Pond, 1947). These were the very passages that maintenance staff said were left open due to poor construction. Reliance on DDT alone ignored these connections. Pond and colleagues did not as a rule object to chemical pest control, but they urged attention to buildings and the domestic environment first and foremost. Public housing planners and managers largely disregarded Pond’s recommendations; facing tight budgets, they could no longer afford to tend to public housing as a physical resource for supporting social reproduction and community health. Whereas managers like Sherman Aldrich had used public resources to free all residents from pests, just over a decade later managers cast off the duty of maintaining a healthy domestic environment. They increasingly neglected the communal environment of housing projects – not just public hallways and common areas, but also buildings’ shared guts where vermin bred. Officials instead followed what seemed a cheaper, easier route: like the rest of American society, they embraced new pesticide technologies. Managers shared tips in NAHO’s professional journal about new pesticide formulations and building materials manufactured with pesticides – for example, paint and lumber pretreated with DDT (Journal of Housing, 1945). The Federal Public Housing Authority hired experts to train local maintenance staff to apply organochloride pesticides. Much as manufacturers of over-the-counter pesticides did, trainers called for spraying a wide variety of indoor surfaces, from beds, cots, and cribs for bedbugs, to walls, ceilings, and screens for flies (Metzler, 1946). They did not address the spaces between units, which served as havens and migratory passageways for pests. Before 1945, the mobility of bedbugs and HCN reinforced the notion of home as a fluid scale within the public housing community. After 1945, public housing policy and pest management practices ignored the ecology of pests there. Quick, cheap, technical fixes substituted for sound building design and communal environmental management, while neglect helped produce environments that were all the more permeable to insects. Quick fixes were not all unsuccessful – complaints about bedbugs in the US dropped dramatically after 1945, although some very poor families continued to suffer with them. Another insect, however, Blattella germanica, the German cockroach, seemed undaunted by the new pesticides, and also took advantage of the physical decline of the projects.3 As early as 1947, two years after managers began applying DDT, NAHO’s professional journal noted ‘‘alarming . . . degrees of infestation” by B. germanica in projects across the US (Journal of Housing, 1947a). Apartment buildings in temperature climes offered ideal conditions. The roach’s physical characteristics bound it to these environments, and its high reproductive rate helped it evolve genetically and spread rapidly throughout buildings. Cupped feet allow them to scale surfaces like walls and pipes, and flexible bodies let them take advantage of crevices as thin as one-half millimeter for hiding and spreading from unit to unit. Typical apartment designs in the twentieth-century US – public or private – feature open voids within walls and shared utilities that bridged the voids between adjacent units (Mallis, 1954: 169). These construction elements form a shared space within housing that is invisible to humans. If insertion points for utility lines remain unsealed – as maintenance staff reported – roaches can find passage from one kitchen to the next along water or gas pipes or electric cables. Neither housing managers nor residents were aware of the mundane fact of cockroach movement and reproduction

3 The name ‘‘German cockroach” does not reflect this animal’s actual geographic origins.

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occurring within wall voids, but pest control practices made this micro-environment ever more attractive to roaches. Although health experts like Allen Pond explained roaches’ habit of moving between interconnected domestic spaces, users of the new pest control technologies treated apartments as isolated environments. Properties of DDT and related organochloride pesticides led the pest control industry to develop a service called ‘‘maintenance contracting” that ensured regular payments from residential and business clients (Hockenyos, 1946). Under maintenance contracts, pest control workers made regular visits to clients to reapply a coat of residual spray. Housing authorities brought the same procedures to public housing by either contracting with a private firm or training staff to perform the spraying (Journal of Housing, 1947b). Either way, this practice, developed for the suburban single-family homes considered standard after the war, had particularly problematic effects in the environment of public housing projects. Pest control workers sprayed surfaces in individual units, but did not examine spaces between units where roaches could move and breed (Metzler, 1946). Residents and managers alike maintained their faith in the new chemicals, however. At least for the moment, the appearance of technician carrying spray equipment supplied an illusion that managers were applying the most effective methods to control vermin. German cockroaches used public housing in precisely the ways Pond described, but no one predicted the role organochloride sprays would play in the process (Wood, 2009). When residents or managers sprayed individual units, roaches rapidly learned to avoid the poisons by fleeing into in wall voids (Ebeling et al., 1966). Attracted to water as well as food, roaches could sneak back into units later to take advantage of leaky pipes and errant crumbs (Shuyler, 1956). B. germanica was capable of colonizing an entire apartment building if the building provided a permeable environment. Miracle pesticides in the post-war era had promised power over nature in agriculture, landscaping, public health, as well as the home, but cockroaches soon revealed gaps in that promise. Like other technologies examined by critical geographers of home – such as refrigerators, septic systems, and plumbing – residual pesticide sprays abetted the illusion that nature in the home could be controlled at the scale of the individual, private dwelling (Miller, 1991; Watkins, 2006; Kaika, 2004; Moran, 2008). DDT and related pesticides arrived on the scene in tandem with policies that took a sharp turn toward neglecting public housing in favor of single-family dwellings. While these new policies were undergirded by ideologies that represented multi-family and public housing as deviant (Blunt and Dowling, 2006), the policies themselves were in large part responsible for degrading environments found in those types of homes. In the decades that followed this confluence of events, B. germanica became an ever more tenacious inhabitant of those environments, often hailing human residents and managers to adopt practices that made homes ever more unhealthy. 5. The consequences of private-ness: the ecology of resistance unfolds The introduction of DDT and the withdrawal of funding from public housing maintenance helped set in motion a suite of ecological changes there that unfolded over the remainder of the twentieth century. Human residents and cockroaches, most notably, both staged their own kinds of resistance to prevailing pest control practices. Human residents, cockroaches, and professionals including housing managers and pest control technicians, several different chemical pesticides, and the built structure of public housing took part in these shifting political-ecological assemblages, as did political imaginations of the public and the private. Political imaginations of the environment also increasingly entered the picture, as

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evidence grew that both cockroaches and pesticides threatened health, and as the legacy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring reshaped pest control practices and regulation throughout American society. These assemblages continue to evolve today, influenced by Carson’s legacy and the environmental justice movement, as in the story of the women of Henry Horner Homes. Although maintenance budgets were curtailed, the federal government and housing authorities gradually expanded the public housing stock. Meanwhile, however, the small budget line dedicated to pest control in each city did not grow in proportion. Gene Wood, a University of Maryland entomologist, examined the history of roaches in Baltimore’s public housing and found that as new buildings were added, authorities kept the pest control budget constant. Staff had little choice but to spend less time on each building and unit (Wood, 1980). A Chicago pest management consultant, David Shangle, observed that similar practices persisted among government clients in his city to the present day, but there clients switched to ever-cheaper contractors each year (Shangle, 2006). In both cases, valuable knowledge about the indoor environment and its pest populations was either lost or never gathered. Pest controllers might have used this knowledge to identify roach-breeding areas and allocate labor to sealing cracks, replacing worn fixtures, and educating residents about how to assist with pest management. But such small-scale features of public housing remained beyond the sight-line of the state. Residents, of course, possessed daily knowledge of the ecology of home, and they observed its decline alongside the rise of roaches. The first generation of tenants had greeted managers as advocates who could raise the quality of their living environment, even if this meant some uncomfortable sacrifices of privacy. As Rhonda Williams has noted, however, residents who moved in as austere budgets took effect in the late 1940s and 1950s noticed the figurative and literal cracks forming in their homes. Infestation became one of many objects of mundane struggle between residents, particularly mothers, and managers. Vermin appeared in the ostensibly private space of dwelling units, and managers often blamed individual residents for poor housekeeping (Oleniak, 1955). Baltimore records include complaints from several women-led tenant groups about severe infestations. In at least one project, management told leaders that families should not allow these animals into their units – as if they had done so deliberately (Williams, 2004). Activist residents instead laid responsibility for infestation upon the state, making domestic space a political issue rather than simply private (Williams, 2004; Ruffin, 2006). They began to see vermin as a problem of community environmental quality that happened to appear in individual units. Infestations only became more tenacious through the middle decades of the twentieth century as housing deterioration and use of new pesticides marshaled cockroaches’ adaptive capacities. In 1947, manufacturers released a new chemical called chlordane, similar to DDT but easier to use against roaches (Journal of Housing, 1947d). Chlordane seemed so easy to use that it attracted new pest controllers to the trade, many of them poorly trained (Wood, 1980; Shangle, 2006). Pest control tradespeople, along with household do-it-yourselfers, doused homes clumsily with chlordane until B. germanica populations in cities across the US evolved genetic resistance, rendering the chemical nearly useless in the mid- to late 1950s (Mallis, 1954; Ebeling, 1975). Between the 1950s and the 1980s, housing authorities like Baltimore’s climbed aboard the pesticide treadmill, trying and discarding several more chemicals as roaches evolved resistance to each in turn: chlordane, malathion, diazinon, and the branded products Baygon, and Ficam. In Baltimore’s case, many of these treatments still worked on German cockroaches elsewhere in the city (Wood, 1980). Housing reformers once promised state protection of housing quality, but the state’s neglect and pesticide use constituted new ecologies in

public housing that produced stronger strains of insects than in most home environments. In 1965, a University of California entomologist, Walter Ebeling, showed how the decaying structure of the projects helped stimulate genetic as well as behavioral resistance to pesticides among German cockroaches (Ebeling et al., 1965, 1966, 1967). In experiments performed in an infested public housing complex in San Francisco, Ebeling and his team found that in units treated with organochlorides or organophosphates, ‘‘some of the surviving insects [after a residual application] . . . may learn to avoid the treated areas and seek harborage elsewhere in the building” (Ebeling, 1975: 242). In Baltimore, Gene Wood later noted that typical pesticide application techniques ‘‘resulted in roaches migrating from units with heavy [roach] populations to units which had few before” through wall voids and utility lines – exactly as Allen Pond had predicted (Wood, 1980). The poisons that were supposed to serve as chemical barriers in individual units actually repelled pests into the gaps between apartments, where they could breed freely and re-enter human living spaces. Cockroaches defied individualized approaches to pest control in public housing, taking advantage of dwelling units’ permeability. The practices that Wood and Ebeling observed persisted in spite of the emerging mainstream environmental movement’s harsh criticism of pesticides, sparked in part by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Some scholars have argued that the 1962 bestseller, and the activism it inspired, appealed primarily to white, middle-class mothers, with its images of poisons in the pastoral suburbs (Heiman, 1996; Taylor, 1997). Much environmental justice literature emphasizes the failure of mainstream environmentalism to address the concerns of low-income communities (Gottlieb, 1993). Yet the growing awareness of ecological webs connecting the human body with other species and the environment applied equally to suburbs and subsidized housing, even if the latter received far less attention. A 1964 study was the first to suggest that low-income people carried high body burdens of pesticides, and a handful of studies that followed surmised that it was because residents of low-income housing were confronting particular severe infestations (Hoffman et al., 1964; Secretary’s Commission, 1969). Residents of poorly-maintained housing had even more reason to worry about the body-environment connection: other medical research in 1964 found that constant exposure to high levels of German cockroach proteins – which become airborne when dead roaches decompose – heightened children’s risk of developing asthma (Bernton and Brown, 1964). The competing health threats of roaches and pesticides left residents of highly infested homes in a quandary about pest control that received little attention from mainstream environmentalists. While the broader response to Silent Spring unfolded, public housing residents resisted the state’s pest control practices by their own means. Resistance was often not organized, but individual – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the individualized treatment of apartments under maintenance contracts. In Baltimore, Gene Wood observed that pest control contractors ‘‘fostered distrust” when they communicated poorly with residents and failed to rein in roaches. Residents at Henry Horner Homes in Chicago observed that, mere days after a routine spraying, cockroaches would return to worry the children and foul the pantry. Many residents refused entry to contractors, fed up with the foul odor of ineffective spraying and suspicious of what seemed to be a pointless intrusion into ‘‘private” space (Wood, 1980). Some responded by spending hundreds of dollars each year on over-the-counter pesticides as they attempted to control the problem themselves. This practice was not unique – surveys in many other projects find similar efforts to take pest control into one’s own hands, and even some demands that housing authorities apply stronger chemicals (Wood et al., 1981; Surgan et al., 2002). Disunity among residents often turned

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into angry suspicion of neighbors (Wood, 2009). When residents accused one another of feeding their project’s roach population, they showed how fragmented their communities had become in spite of a contiguous living environment. Roaches literally brought home the intimate interconnections among neighbors – much to individual families’ frustration. In some places, however, individual resistance transformed into collective action based upon the common environment and political struggles of the community. At Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes, some residents worried that both roaches and roach control were dangerous to health. Many children in Horner suffered from asthma, including one son of a resident named Sarah Ruffin. Both Ruffin and her son’s doctor believed that roaches had contributed to the boy’s illness. But Ruffin also had respiratory problems and worried that pesticides worsened her whole family’s health. In fact, some of the most popular cockroach-killers, diazinon and chlorpyrifos, would soon be banned for domestic use by the Environmental Protection Agency because of their suspected role in birth defects and neurological damage (Davis and Ahmed, 1998; Landrigan et al., 1999; Needham, 2005). Convinced that the state’s sprays were futile against cockroaches anyway, Ruffin and several of her neighbors obtained notes from physicians stating their units must not be treated. They came to agree that the project’s infestation resulted from managers’ failure at ‘‘keeping the buildings up” (Ruffin, 2006). This failure did not only allow roaches to leak through walls; pipes leaked water and stairwells leaked heat. Meanwhile, Horner residents began to organize politically against neoliberal housing policies affecting Chicago homes, including a threat to demolish the project and scatter residents into private housing. They named cockroaches as one of the most important indicators of the housing authority’s neglect (Popkin et al., 2000; Safer Pest Control Project, 2002; Viehweg, 2006).

6. Conclusions This story has traced four factors that transformed the political ecology of public housing in the US over its history. At the birth of public housing in 1937, a web woven of political economies of housing, pesticide technologies, insects, and resident-management relations, mutually constituted public housing as a commons. Policies governing the political economy of public housing held the state responsible for residents’ well-being and environmental health, linking social reproduction in the home to the public realm. Powerful non-human agents helped marshal communal pest management practices: bedbugs as insects capable of colonizing entire communities and overcoming most pesticides; and hydrocyanic acid gas as an acutely toxic and mobile fumigant and the only chemical at the time that could stop bedbugs’ life cycle. Low-income residents, eager to shed the health burdens of their old housing and secure safe spaces for their families, accepted the public constitution of their homes, giving up individual privacy and control for the state’s protection of the domestic realm. Cognizant of the impossibility of controlling bedbugs – and HCN – at the scale of the individual unit, residents and officials opted to manage public housing’s environment collectively. After 1945 these factors began to shift, re-weaving the socionature of public housing. Pesticides like DDT, which seemed safe and immobile in the environment of the individual dwelling unit compared with HCN, became available to the public, and housing managers relaxed their commitment to project-wide pest control. In fact, pest control staff paid most attention to the interior of individual units, although insects bred and migrated in the interstices of the building. At the same time, the dedication to social welfare laid out in the Housing Act of 1937 dissolved under the political influence of development and real estate capital, and the federal

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government deprived public housing of needed maintenance funds, particularly after the Housing Act of 1949. A new ecology continued to unfold over subsequent decades, as insects responded to new chemicals and the decay of buildings. Bedbugs mostly died off, but the combination of synthetic pesticides and declining infrastructure hailed German cockroaches’ highly plastic genomes and behavioral repertoires, allowing populations to establish themselves firmly in public housing. Human residents, frustrated also with other policy and environmental changes, staged a subtle but growing resistance to managers’ sporadic pest control efforts when persistent cockroach infestations signaled the state’s neglect. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, state practices ignored the unruly nature of public housing projects and the degree to which that nature was shared among residents. When the state treated the home as ‘‘private” space it denied not only the public responsibility for people living under its roof, but also the flows that connected residents with one another and the ‘‘unpredictable and lively agency” of non-humans there (Castree, 2002: 130). As in the cases of domestic water (Kaika, 2004) and turfgrasses (Robbins, 2007), individual householders were not solely in control of the environment of their dwelling units. Instead, they were just some of many agents enmeshed in an interdependent web, each of whom was marshaled to action by transformations in nature and political economy. These webs constitute homes that have always been materially permeable – it has only been in some ‘‘political imaginations” (Smith, 2004: 90) that they were isolated from one another and from nature. More broadly, this paper offers a case for applying political ecology frameworks in settings that may appear to be beyond the realm of nature, such as the home. Critical geographers of home share with political ecologists a concern about the categorization of spaces, resources, and production processes – including ‘‘social reproduction” – as ‘‘private” or ‘‘public.” The historical political ecology of public housing reveals the contingent making of the ‘‘private” dwelling unit and also the privatization of a ‘‘social reproduction” activity, domestic pest management, that actually connects with ecologies that transcend and transgress the bounds of home and the human body. In this way, this story mirrors other critical geographies of home that problematize the privatization of domestic labor and nature (Domosh, 1998; Kaika, 2004; Crabtree, 2006). The health implications of a ‘‘privatized” view of nature in domestic space – in this case asthma and exposure to toxic pesticides – make it imperative that we forge a fluid ecological politics of the home (Crabtree, 2006). The women of Henry Horner Homes exemplify that kind of politics. Horner residents concluded that the solution to pesticides and cockroaches lay in, as Sherman Aldrich had once insisted, treating the project like a communal ecosystem. Empowered by a legal ruling4 to compel action on the part of the Chicago Housing Authority, the Horner residents’ council demanded that CHA renovate their project with roach-proof construction and instate a pest control program based on sanitation, building maintenance, and resident involvement, referred to as Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Roaches disappeared within weeks of the renovation, and residents like Ruffin have led community efforts to maintain a roach-free environment. Horner residents merged housing activism with environmental activism, and their story brings the process of shifting political imaginations of home full circle. The women of Horner challenged management policies that relegated responsibility for pest control and indoor environmental health to the private sphere. This challenge has more recently been taken up by other environmental justice and health advocacy organizations that advocate IPM as a 4 This was the ruling in Gautreaux v. CHA, a suit by an African-American CHA resident that proved the housing authority had systematically segregated black and white public housing residents.

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way to protect families, particularly children, from exposure to both pesticides and cockroaches (for example, State of New York, 2004).5 Those who contest conventional pest control know that political ecology of home is not just important for permeable dwellings, but also for the permeable bodies that live within them. Acknowledgements The author wishes to acknowledge the National Science Foundation and the American Association of University Women for support of the research and writing of this article. Thanks also to the editor, Scott Prudham, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice. Maureen McLachlan and Julianna Kuhn provided valuable research help. Thanks to interview informants, particularly Sarah Ruffin, for sharing their stories. References Abbott, E., Breckenridge, S., 1936. The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Aldrich, S., 1938. Leasing: the Chicago leasing experience. Paper presented at the Seminar on Managing Low-rent Housing, Washington, DC. American Public Health Association, 1941. Housing for Health. Science Press Printing Company, Lancaster, PA. American Public Health Association, 1946. An Appraisal Method for Measuring the Quality of Housing: A Yardstick for Health Officers, Housing Officials and Planners. American Public Health Association, New York. Back, E., Cotton, R., 1932. Hydrocyanic acid gas as a fumigant for destroying household insects. United States Department of Agriculture Farmers’ Bulletin 1670. Bartlett, A., 1945. Chemical Marvels take the ‘bugs’ out of living. Popular Science 150, 154 (May). Bernton, H., Brown, H., 1964. Insect allergy: preliminary studies of the cockroach. Journal of Allergy 35 (6), 506–513. Blaikie, P., 1985. The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries. Wiley, New York. Blunt, A., Dowling, R., 2006. Home. Routledge, London. Braun, B., 2005. Writing a more-than-human urban geography. Progress in Human Geography 29 (5), 635–650. Carson, R., 1962. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Castree, N., 2002. False antithesis? Marxism, nature and actor-networks. Antipode 34 (1), 111–146. Chicago Daily Tribune, 1938. Find US pays rent money to its own tenants. 24 November. Cousineau, A., Legg, F., 1935. Hydrocyanic acid gas and other toxic gases in commercial fumigation. American Journal of Public Health 25, 277–287. Crabtree, L., 2006. Disintegrated houses: exploring ecofeminist housing and urban design options. Antipode 38 (4), 711–734. Davis, D., Ahmed, A., 1998. Exposures from indoor spraying of chlorpyrifos pose greater health risks to children than currently estimated. Environmental Health Perspectives 106 (6), 299–301. Desfor, G., Keil, R., 2004. Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Domosh, M., 1998. Geography and gender: home, again? Progress in Human Geography 22 (2), 276–282. Ebeling, W., 1975. Urban Entomology. University of California Division of Agricultural Sciences, Berkeley. Ebeling, W. et al., 1965. Cockroach control in public housing. Pest Control Operator News 25 (12), 21–24. Ebeling, W. et al., 1966. Influence of repellency on the efficacy of blatticides I. Learned modification of behavior of the German cockroach. Journal of Economic Entomology 59 (6), 1374–1388. Ebeling, W. et al., 1967. Influence of repellency on the efficacy of blatticides II. Laboratory experiments with German cockroaches. Journal of Economic Entomology 60 (5), 1375–1390. Exterminators’ Log, 1933. Pertinent questions asked of an exterminator. February 3. Gandy, M., 2002. Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Goldfeld, A., 1938. The Diary of a Housing Manager. National Association of Housing Officials, Chicago. Gottlieb, R., 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Island, Washington, DC. Hackworth, J., 2003. Public housing and the rescaling of regulation in the USA. Environment and Planning A 35 (3), 531–549. 5 The State of New York was the lead plaintiff (along with four other US states, the Virgin Islands, and environmental justice organizations) in a suit against the Department of Housing and Urban Development that charged that HUD did too little to promote low-toxicity pest control methods in domestic environments.

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