Jack Styler
A New York street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the day before garbage pickup
In mid-October, Jessica Tisch, New York’s Department of Sanitation commissioner, stood in front of a white, unusually clean garbage truck to announce that the vast majority of residential properties must use secure trash cans starting in the fall of 2024. And not just any trash can: By the summer of 2026, all residents will have to get their hands on official New York bins. Today, all food-related businesses use secure containers. By next spring, all commercial businesses will also have to use them.
New York Mayor Eric Adams has joined city leaders across the country who are finally taking decisive action to combat rats. New York officials reported twice as much rodent activity in 2022 as they did in 2021. Last April, after Adams declared “war” on the vermin, he appointed Kathleen Corradi as the city’s first-ever “rat czar.” To find a solution for New York, the Adams administration also paid the consulting firm McKinsey & Company $4 million to study the types of trash containers used by other cities around the world and figure out what works for New York.
Washington is near the top of the annual “Rattiest Cities List,” compiled by Orkin, the pest control company. The Washington Post reported that residents already had called 311 with rat complaints nearly 11,000 times by July of this year, putting the nation’s capital on track to far exceed its 2022 totals. People are even taking matters into their own hands by going on “rat hunts” with their dogs at night through the city’s dirtiest corners. Like Adams, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser seeks to step up her city’s container policies, allocating $3.4 million in her 2024 budget proposal to begin replacing residents’ trash cans.
A recent study by a New York–based pest control company determined that there are an estimated three million rats in New York. Counting rats is a costly and labor-intensive job, but rat populations in major cities appear to be increasing after a rare decline during the pandemic. Leaders in America’s largest and “rattiest” cities are starting to understand the problem, but it has taken them decades to come to terms with a simple fact: To drive rat numbers down, cities must take on the human behavior that is making life a picnic for rats.
“When people say, ‘Why can’t we get control?’ I’m like, ‘Hold up a mirror,’” said Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist who has been studying rodents for over 35 years.
Corrigan and other scientists agree: The most important factor in keeping rat populations low is refuse management. Rats in cities live off garbage left out by humans. By putting garbage out on streets in plastic bags, as New York residents have for decades, leaving restaurant dumpsters open, and allowing garbage to overflow before trash pickup day, humans provide rats with their food, allowing them to multiply in droves. An average female Norway rat, the most common species in major cities, can have four to six litters a year, each with up to 12 pups.
Rats have been burrowing in and around American cities since the Norway rat first came over from Europe around 1775. No neighborhood is completely free of rats, but the numbers are especially high in poorer communities. In her 2019 book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Northwestern University, details how rats were a physical manifestation of the housing inequality that affected Black residents living in America’s inner cities. Rat bites were common. The animals often attacked residents and burrowed through the foundations of their homes while landlords and local officials ignored the pleas for help.
People often claim they want fewer rats but resist the changes that they could make to thwart rats.
That reality was not lost on civil rights leaders in the 1960s. In Washington, civil rights organizer Julius Hobson Sr. captured rats and put them in a cage on the top of his car. He then drove to white neighborhoods and released them, which ultimately forced the city’s leaders to do more to protect Black residents. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at a Chicago rally decrying the conditions in which Black residents lived following an incident in which an infant died in his crib after being attacked by rats in 1966.
Michael H. Parsons, an urban field ecologist at Fordham University, says researchers call the racial split on the issue “environmental racism.” Even today, Parsons told the Prospect, “it remains an uncomfortable fact.”
When politicians have confronted rat eradication tactics, their proposals lean toward the bloodthirsty and involve gimmicky contraptions. New York mayors have spent big on futile solutions. Rudy Giuliani went on an $8 million extermination campaign that employed three different types of rodenticides—and promptly failed to make a dent in the rat population. Bill de Blasio pledged $32 million to his rodent war that included the use of dry ice to kill rats in their burrows. During his tenure as Brooklyn borough president, Adams touted a grisly device that would drown rats in a vinegar-based mixture; he eagerly displayed floating rat carcasses to reporters at a press conference.
City dwellers have undoubtedly been the losers in local politicians’ repeated failures to follow the science and deal with trash. But the winner—besides rats—has been the rodenticide industry: By 2027, the sector will pull in an estimated $7.1 billion. Unsurprisingly, however, rodenticides are terrible for the environment. Once a rat ingests poisoned bait, it could take up to two weeks to die. If another animal eats the rat during that period or its carcass, it, too, could die, which moves the toxins up the food chain. Moreover, when it rains, rodenticide can seep into local waterways. Corrigan, the rodentologist, told the Prospect that scientists have found rodenticides in fish and other aquatic animals. “In many ways,” he says, it’s “the DDT of our time.”
In Portland, Maine, city officials have turned to smart technology to target specific areas where rats are reported in high numbers. The city is in its fourth year using passive infrared technology manufactured by a Maine-based company to sense changes in ambient temperature to eradicate rodents aboveground and in the city’s sewer system. Though the devices are baited, they don’t use rodenticides.
Dispensing with toxic chemicals was an important factor for John Emerson, Portland’s utility coordinator. Emerson says that the technology has been a success in the growing coastal city, which had “a fairly significant [rodent] problem” since new building excavations have disturbed more rodent burrows. But it’s not a cheap venture: Before adopting the technology, the city spent around $10,000 annually on rodent control. Today, the city spends $200,000 per year. There are 11 other midsized cities in New England using the company’s technology.
But educating the public on proper food waste management techniques along with smooth collaboration between city departments, public-health officials, and research institutions are the keys to success. Since rodents reproduce at such a rapid rate, no technology could ever keep up. Corrigan estimated that 96 percent of rats in a city would have to be exterminated for the population not to rebound.
Even when vermin populations do go down, Claudia Riegel, the director of the New Orleans Mosquito, Termite and Rodent Control Board, says that rodent and other vector-control programs need to be supported by residents and businesses. The nightmare scenario, according to Riegel, is an unknown pathogen that jumps from rats to humans if those programs are caught flat-footed or underresourced. “Rodent control is complex because you’re dealing with people,” Riegel told the Prospect.
People often claim they want fewer rats but resist the changes that they could make to thwart rats. Corrigan says that scientists have told cities for years that allowing residents to put out their trash on the morning of the collection day would be the most effective solution to keeping rats from getting food. New York did shift when residents could put out trash bags from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on the day before garbage collection. That new window might mean progress for the city, but rodents still have an open invitation to an all-night, all-you-can-eat buffet. For Corrigan, however, the question is simple: “Do we want rats, or do we not want rats?”
