Tucked amid the tidy neighborhoods throughout the Washington area, homes of hoarders are hiding carpets soggy from the urine of dozens of animals. Hundreds — perhaps thousands — have boxes crawling with maggots and kitchens reeking of rotting food. Some have stacks of papers so high and pathways so narrow that firefighters barely stand a chance once a blaze starts. “We’d typically call the Department of Social Services, but that’s if the house isn’t already burned down,” said Mark Brady, spokesman for the Prince George’s County fire department.
Brady, like many area officials, has learned that hoarding is not general messiness, or the dozen extra boxes of knickknacks that some pack rats can’t part with. It’s an expensive and a dangerous problem that may worsen as the region’s population ages.
Montgomery County spent more than $17,000 in October to house a family and clean their home after a neighbor’s complaint about outside debris revealed severe hoarding.
A hoarder’s home in Springfield received media attention earlier this month when more than 50 cats were removed from it and wound up infecting every cat in Fairfax County’s animal shelter with a deadly virus. The outbreak led shelter officials to a tragic solution — euthanizing the shelter’s 80 cats.
“When you go into a home and see animals all sickly and crawling with parasites, that’s pretty heart-wrenching,” said police Sgt. Lynn Reid, a Fairfax County animal control officer for nearly 25 years. “But it’s important to note that these people don’t see themselves as doing anything wrong — a lot of the time they think they’re saving the animals.”
In Montgomery County, a newly formed hoarding task force brings together representatives from various agencies ranging from police and fire departments to Adult Protective Services. Fairfax and Arlington counties have formed similar collaborations since the late 1990s.
When community members or county agencies report hoarders early enough, they can significantly reduce costs later on.
A recent study conducted in Melbourne, Australia, found that while the homes of hoarders accounted for less than 1 percent of the city’s fires, they accounted for 25 percent of fire-related deaths.
In its first annual report, Montgomery’s task force sounded the alarm that hoarding as a mental disorder could affect nearly 3 percent of the county’s population, or roughly 30,000 people. The number of cases that come to the attention of county authorities each year is far less — about 80 in fiscal 2010.
The $10,000 allotted to the county’s task force in 2011 is hardly enough when cleaning up a single home can cost $6,000, said Bonnie Klem, a social worker who heads the county’s Adult Protective Services investigations.
As the region’s baby boomers grow into their senior years, hoarding cases are expected to grow exponentially.
It’s not that hoarding behaviors begin in old age — in fact, they start in adolescence, said Randy Frost, a professor at Smith College and the co-author of “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.” But hoarding usually doesn’t become a serious problem until decades later.
“Once they begin to lose resources — say, a spouse dies — then, it gets out of hand,” Frost said. “Also, when people in their 50s begin to lose parents and all of the parents’ stuff comes to them — that sometimes puts them over the top.”
Hoarders of things don’t see themselves as collecting junk. “You can’t look through our eyes and see what the hoarder is seeing,” Klem said. “These aren’t people who purposefully want to be slobs or a danger to their neighbors. These are people who have a mental health problem.”
