Four years, $50,000, a two-week-long evacuation and countless hours of volunteer labor later, the Langdon Mill building in Manchester is bedbug-free.

Or just about.

On Wednesday evening, as men carrying brand-new mattresses maneuvered through the building's narrow hallways, signs of infestation persisted in three of the 20 units.

"We need to have someone here for a few weeks more," Maggie Fogarty said, looking up from her clipboard.

Fogarty, a housing advocate and community organizer, has been leading efforts to rid the building of bedbugs. She and others involved with the project, call it a success - a far cry from when the building's 15 families, most of whom are refugees from Africa and Eastern Europe, were bit nightly.

They moved the families out of the building. They washed and dried all of their clothes and bedding on high heat. They threw out almost all of the furniture they owned - not just mattresses and couches, but tables and desks, too - and solicited donated replacements. After exterminators had sprayed everything, the families came back.

As their war on bedbugs winds down, another has begun in Concord at the Endicott Hotel. There, an infestation has burdened residents who say they lack the money or means to comply with certain pest-control measures.

Rosemary Heard, the president of CATCH Neighborhood Housing, which owns the building, said last week the nonprofit has been following the advice of its pest-control company. She also said CATCH was "working to pull together a group of community providers" but didn't want to elaborate on arrangements before they became final.

She said she was "very aware of the stress this places on individuals" and criticized the Monitor for drawing attention to the low incomes of Endicott residents and the mental illnesses a number endure, describing it as "linking the issue."

"The whole issue of bedbugs is not simply something linked to one's level of income, or one's level of independence," she said. "They're everywhere."

But the costs of dealing with an infestation cut deep for those who have little. In Manchester, "we couldn't ask

these refugee tenants to run every piece of clothing they had through a high heat cycle in the dryer. It cost us thousands of dollars to do it for them," Fogarty said. "They certainly couldn't afford to go out and buy all new stuff, even secondhand stuff.

"One of the problems we have not figured out is, how do you do this if you're of limited means? How do you do this effectively?" she said. "It's a very expensive problem."

In the Langdon Mill building, tenants began reporting bedbugs near the end of 2005 and beginning of 2006, said Dick Anagnost, the building's owner. In response, he began sending in exterminators, one unit at a time.

"We thought we had it under control," he said.

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