City Push to Eradicate Rats Now Aims New Regs at Residences

The rat buffet may be getting cut back, but not until next fall.

Under tough new regulations, smaller residential buildings will soon be forced to follow food establishments and restaurants and replace the plastic bags that blighted streets and supplied an easy food supply for the city’s burgeoning rat population with hard plastic containers.

Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Department of Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch unveiled the new citywide rule that would require buildings with nine or fewer residential units to put trash in secure containers by fall 2024, and also in official NYC Bins by summer 2026. The rule, which would affect around 765,000 buildings, comes at the heels of a similar directive issued in that went into effect July 30 that applied to food establishments and restaurants in the city.

“With this new plan to put residential trash in containers, 70 percent of trash in our city will be off our streets and out of rat buffet lines,” said Adams at a press conference. “We are moving aggressively to execute our ambitious vision and deliver the clean, safe city New Yorkers demand and deserve.”

Tisch also offered some fighting words. “Less than one year ago, we stood in front of City Hall and declared war on the rats, war on the bags, and war on the idea that other cities could get their trash off the streets, but New York couldn’t. We’re closer than ever to showing the doubters, the rat-sympathizers, and the trash-lovers just how wrong they were.”

Meanwhile, the city’s Department of Health, in collaboration with Manhattan Community Board 7 and City Council Members Gale Brewer, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, and Shaun Abreu, is running two-hour virtual training programs designed to arm residents with anti-rat know-how. The first of this month’s “Rat Academy” sessions, which will be held on October 17, is for community gardeners, while the second (October 26) targets building staff, homeowners, and tenants. In addition, Rat Academy offers three-day advanced courses for pest control professionals twice a year, in which attendees will learn about rat biology, contributing factors to infestation, site-specific responses, and effective communication strategies with the public.

For its part, the City Council has distributed funds to members through the Cleanup NYC Initiative in order to aid them in boosting sanitation services in their districts. Council Member Julia Menin announced she is utilizing $20,000 of those funds for a rat mitigation program for the Upper East Side.

“It is unacceptable that rats are prevalent in our neighborhoods as their gnawing and burrowing can cause property damage and rodents spread disease and reduce our quality of life,” she said. “To confront this challenge head-on, we’ve adopted an assertive approach and embraced innovative strategies with this rat mitigation program.” Such strategies include the use of the Burrow Rx machine, an anti-burrower carbon monoxide sprayer developed by exterminator Matthew Deodato, which according to Menin’s office has demonstrated an eradication rate of 100 percent in the tree pits where it was applied.

New York City’s residents have a tough battle ahead. In August of this year, an oft-cited report from M and M Pest Control concluded that there are about 3 million rats roaming across New York City, which is close to a third of the city’s human population.

The Norwegian brown rat, also known as the sewer rat, was believed to have arrived first in the New World on board a ship around the time of the American Revolution and quickly multiplied. And the rats are mean. “They’ll gnaw through walls. They’ll gnaw through wires. They’ll destroy cars,” Fordham University biologist Dr. Jason Munshi-South told the New York Times. And while they are a plague to humans, they often attack themselves, he noted.