Jersey City's pest problem starts with its buildings. A huge share of the residential stock is pre-war multi-family — two- and three-family wood frames, converted brownstones, and mid-century apartment blocks — all of it built with shared walls, shared plumbing chases, and aging foundations that give pests easy harborage and easy movement between units. Layer in newer waterfront high-rises around Newport and Exchange Place, a dense restaurant corridor along Sip and Bergen Avenues, and older commercial strips downtown, and you get a city where almost every property type needs a slightly different approach.
The result is a fairly consistent baseline citywide: German cockroaches running hardest in the older multi-family buildings and food-service kitchens, Norway rats and house mice working basements, alleys, and utility lines everywhere from the Heights to Greenville, and bed bugs migrating unit-to-unit in any building with shared walls. On top of that baseline, pavement and carpenter ants work foundation lines each spring, brown marmorated stink bugs blanket upper-floor units every October and November, and subterranean termites turn up in the city's oldest wood-framed buildings.