Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at the success of the city’s efforts to curb its rat problem. We’ll also look at Mayor Eric Adams’s testimony in the House.
The last time Kathleen Corradi saw a rat in New York City was in December, when she went on a “rat walk” outing that was open to the public.
Corradi, the city’s rat czar, did not say that her experience meant there are no rats in New York City anymore. There is no way to know how many there are. “We don’t have a rat census, right?” she noted during a recent conversation.
But one way the city tracks the fight against rats is by calls to 311. The downward numbers are a sign, Corradi said, that efforts to cause “additional stress” for rats were doing just that.
One recent source of stress for rats was a requirement for single-family homes and small apartment buildings to containerize their trash. The rule took effect in mid-November. Rat sightings — based on calls to 311 — dropped 23 percent in December and 24 percent in January, compared with the same months a year earlier, according to the Sanitation Department.
Joshua Goodman, a deputy sanitation commissioner, called those declines “astounding.”
He and Corradi are not the only officials who say there are fewer rat sightings these days. Shaun Abreu, the chairman of the City Council’s Sanitation Committee, said that rat sightings went down 60 percent in a 10-block section of his district in West Harlem after the city began a pilot project to containerize trash.
It has been 22 months since Mayor Eric Adams named Corradi the city’s rat czar, responsible for bringing the rat population under control, or at least bringing it down. Corradi said the 311 data reflected how in her time on the job, the city had succeeded in “switching the narrative” and “connecting waste to rats, which we haven’t done as a city so much before.”
“That connection is very clear now,” she said. “If rats are well fed and not stressed, they reproduce at a rate that we can’t control.”
She also said that response times for inspections from city agencies had improved so much so that it might not be necessary to call 311 when a rat scurries by.
“We want people to use 311,” she said. “But before you do, I want you to check out the rat portal on the Department of Health website, because what that has is real-time inspections of every property that Health has been to. So before you call about your neighbor and say, ‘We see rats,’ you can open that portal.”
The portal will show whether the neighbor’s property has already been inspected. If so, “it’s already in the enforcement process,” and another call to 311 will not change that, she said. If the owner does not clean things up before a follow-up inspection, usually after two weeks, a summons could be issued, with fines — often $300 for “active rat signs” and $300 for “conditions conducive to rats,” she said.
Corradi said that another way the city had changed the narrative on rats was to set up the New York City Rat Pack. Last year, Adams described this volunteer initiative as a “squad of dedicated anti-rat activists” who attend “rat academy” classes on prevention methods, go on rat walks and participate in a project like a park cleanup.
Corradi said that a thousand people had signed up for the Rat Pack.
A thousand people is not a lot in New York.
“Yeah, well, don’t take all the wind out of my sails,” Corradi said. “Those are people who are sharing the message, communicating with neighbors, talking with their building supers and amplifying this work. So, yes — would I love 8.5 million New Yorkers to do this? Absolutely, but we are building a really strong foundation.”
So how is Corradi doing? Gale Brewer, a City Council member, gives credit to Jessica Tisch, who was the sanitation commissioner until Adams named her police commissioner in November. Tisch was the public face of trash containerization.
But Brewer also mentioned Corradi. “Maybe the rat lady, too,” she said. “It’s not like we get no complaints” about rats now, Brewer said, “but we definitely get fewer.”
The assessment was pretty much the same from John Mainieri, who in 2012 helped his block association on West 76th Street put up “rat crossing” signs, a takeoff on signs warning where deer or cattle often cross a road. “You walk down the street at night,” Mainieri said then, “it’s like a conga line.”
And now?
“Better,” he said. “The rat situation has improved, but it’s still pretty bad.”
“It’s been really cold, so I haven’t seen that many” despite nearby construction, he said. “I’m starting to see them again now. Last year during the warmer months, it was a free-for-all.”
Weather
Expect a partly sunny sky, with the temperature dropping to the upper 40s. In the evening, conditions will become partly cloudy and breezy, and the temperature will dip into the mid-30s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 14 (Purim).
The latest New York news
No quid pro quo, Adams tells a House committee
The House committee hearing was about sanctuary cities. But Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, found himself being questioned by Democrats about accusations that he had agreed to a quid pro quo with the Trump administration — allowing federal immigration agents to go into the Rikers Island jail complex if the administration moved to dismiss a corruption indictment against him.
“No quid pro quo,” Adams said, who appeared at the hearing with three other big-city mayors. “I did nothing wrong.”
Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat of California, asked Adams if he was “selling out New Yorkers to save yourself from prosecution.” Garcia and another California Democrat, Representative Dave Min, said that Adams should resign or be removed by Gov. Kathy Hochul.
And Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a fierce critic of Adams, confronted him about the allegations of a quid pro quo and his efforts to dodge her questions.
“This right here is the four-alarm fire that everyone must be paying attention to,” she said.
House Republicans accused the other mayors of harboring criminal immigrants and berated them for refusing to cooperate fully with the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts. Adams was treated relatively warmly, with the chairman, Representative James Comer of Kentucky, singling him out for praise. Later, Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, defended Adams on social media, saying that the mayor was “trying to protect New Yorkers from violent illegal aliens.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Self-Portrait as subway car
Dear Diary:
Underneath, bleached laces face up in the muck.
A tail rattles past. Wrappers whisper by, splashed
with ketchup and essence of onions. Meanwhile,
a suited man holds luggage in his large left hand.
Meanwhile, a woman’s tongue swishes kanji characters
around her mouth. Meanwhile, a purple pullover puffs
a steel cig. My eyes blink shut, and then my legs screech.
Meanwhile, a pea coat stands alone on the platform.
The brown benches bang on by.
The yellow flecked road dots on by.
Signs swoosh past, as I tumble
from light to dark. Meanwhile, the newlyweds,
making eye contact over bushy heads. She
releases me, sifts through the crowds to find him. He
envelops her, closing his arms over her shifting frame.
I sway, and they sway. I trip, and he catches her. Meanwhile,
a nurse’s eyes are fluttering awake.
Meanwhile, men in matching stitched hats. Women
in matching shirts. Meanwhile, teenagers dressed in matching
desires to fit in. Meanwhile, I stutter
and he catches her again.
— Alixa Brobbey