By Yuqing Pan | realtor.com
ties are bursting with life—too much of it, sometimes. Just ask James Vahter, a video producer who set up shop a few years ago in a trendy part of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He got a sweet deal on a spacious, two-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up, but it didn’t take him long to understand why the rent was so cheap. It happened a few weeks into his stay, when he returned from a business trip in the middle of the night and flipped on the hallway light.
“My walls were crawling,” he recalls. “From the floorboards to the ceiling, cockroaches were everywhere. I ran to the kitchen to grab some Raid—and the counters were crawling too.”
