The data of last year’s community health survey which for the first time included a bed bug question is now available at the city’s Environmental Health Tracking Portal:

Name	Number of Adults Reporting	Percent of Adults Reporting
New York City	404,000	6.7%
Bronx	74,000	8.1%
Brooklyn	161,000	8.9%
Manhattan	74,000	5.8%
Queens	87,000	5%
Staten Island	8,000	2.5%

Source: NYC Community Health Survey (CHS), 2009 – NYC Environmental Public Health and Sustainability Tracking Portal

See also a breakdown by neighborhoods (PDF): Williamsburg-Bushwick: 16.5%, Borough Park: 12.2%, etc.

You’ll see there are many ways to explore the data, including a map, but this is the easiest prize:

On the neighborhood poverty calculations:

Neighborhoods are ranked according to the percent of people whose annual income falls below twice the federal poverty level. Rankings are then divided into 3 approximately equal groupings of low, medium and high poverty.

For more on the neighborhood poverty indicator, see this poverty map document (PDF).

I think all of this is perhaps a bit like Orwell’s notes from his slum sojourn:

But mere notes like these are only valuable as reminders to myself. To me as I read them they bring back what I have seen, but they cannot in themselves give much idea of what conditions are like in those fearful northern slums. Words are such feeble things. What is the use of a brief phrase like “roof leaks” or “four beds for eight people”? It is the kind of thing your eye slides over, registering nothing. And yet what a wealth of misery it can cover!

I am also reminded of something else, from an article written at that familiar, precarious point of false triumph over the bed bug, this time from Iceland. In a section titled Eradicated Ectoparasites, Skírnisson et al. (2003):

Gígja (1944) and Fristrup (1945) state that C. lectularius was the worst pest that had ever occurred in human dwellings in Iceland.

The worst pest that had ever occurred. What does that mean? No bar chart is up to the task.