NYC has a serious case of rat infestation
A handful of New York City neighborhoods are overrun by rodents despite a recent drop in rat sightings citywide, a new report says.
New Yorkers logged 17,353 rat-sighting complaints to the city government this past year, 9 percent fewer than in 2017. But that’s the second-largest number among the five major cities for which the real estate website analyzed 311 data.
The critters were especially abundant in Manhattan and Brooklyn, RentHop’s figures show — the former logged the most complaints per square mile at 188.2, while the latter had the most complaints overall with 6,565.
The two boroughs were also home to the city’s most rat-infested neighborhoods. Prospect Heights residents file an average of 529.7 rat complaints per square mile each year, the highest concentration in the city, followed by Central Harlem South’s 464.9, the report says.
Rounding out the top five are Yorkville with 399.3 average yearly complaints per square mile, Hamilton Heights with 336 and Clinton Hill with 334.9, according to the report.
Some of those numbers may seem large because the neighborhoods are small. Sources calculated the averages based on the total rat complaints logged from 2014 to 2018 and the size of each neighborhood — which was less than one square mile in Prospect Heights’s case, according to data scientist Shane Lee. The Brooklyn nabe saw 408 rat complaints in 2017 and 282 last year, the report says.