Watch Out, Rats!

NYCHA is rolling out a new, aggressive extermination plan to reduce the rat population at the ten most infested developments in the city: Bushwick, Webster, Marcy, Butler, Morris I, Morris II, Riis I, Riis II, Morrisania. The new program is part of the Mayor’s Rat Reduction Plan which aims to reduce the rat population by as much as 70 percent in the City’s three most infested neighborhoods: the Grand Concourse area, Chinatown/East Village/Lower East Side and Bushwick/Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“We want to make the greatest city on earth the worst place in the world to be a rat,” said Mayor de Blasio as he laid out the details at Bushwick Houses on April 17. NYCHA’s program will eliminate food sources and rat burrows by:

• Plugging rat burrows with dry ice, a humane, fast, and effective treatment;
• Placing a full-time exterminator at each development; 
• Providing residents with new, smaller trash bins to reduce clogs in chutes and large bags of trash left on NYCHA grounds; and
• Replacing dirt floors in basements with concrete flooring to keep rats out of buildings.

A partnership between the Authority, the Health Department, and the Department of Sanitation, NYCHA’s rat reduction program will improve quality of life for 23,000 residents.

“Working with our colleagues and our residents, we hope to finally take control of the rat problem at NYCHA,” said NYCHA General Manager Vito Mustaciuolo. “Residents have had to accept rats as a regular presence, but we now have the resources and support to reduce infestations.”