Mayor de Blasio has announced a $32 million plan to reduce rats in the city's most infested neighborhoods. Chris Glorioso reports. 
 
 What to Know Mayor de Blasio has announced a $32 million plan to reduce rats in the city's most infested neighborhoods 
 
 The aim is to reduce trash that attracts the rodents and enable them to survive, thrive and reproduce 
 
 The multi-agency plan will target the Grand Concourse, Chinatown/East Village/Lower East Side, and Bushwick/Bedford-Stuyvsant 
 
 Rats may soon start disappearing from the city's notoriously rodent-filled neighborhoods. 
 
 At least that's what Mayor Bill de Blasio is promising with his $32 million plan to reduce the rat population by up to 70 percent in Grand Concourse; the Chinatown, East Village, Lower East Side area; and the Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods. 
 
 The multi-agency city plan will dramatically reduce available habitats and food sources for rats, with the aim of diminishing rat reproduction and cutting rat colonies. 
 
 That includes adding hundreds of new solar compactor trash bins and replacing all remaining wire waste baskets on parks and street corners with steel cans; exterminating, cleaning out and cementing basements in public-housing buildings; and more frequently picking up trash and removing litters on streets and parks. 
 
 News Coverage Shows Up NYC Rat Problem 
 
 We look back at some of the New York rat stories we've covered in just the last 12 months, as mayor Bill de Blasio announces a new $32 million rat reduction program. (Published Thursday, July 13, 2017) 
 
 The city will also propose laws and fines to discourage building owners from leaving trash out too long or dumping trash illegally, and encourage residents to separate their food waste in sealed rat-resistant organic bins. 
 
 Rats need just an ounce of food a day to survive, according to Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia. 
 
 "We want to get rid of their four-star sidewalk cafes," she said. 
 
 The sanitation, health, parks, buildings and public housing agencies are all involved in the plan. 
 
 In February, health officials said one person had died and two others were severely sickened in a Bronx neighborhood due to a rare disease transmitted by rats. 
 
 

 NEW YORK (AP) — New York City has announced a $32 million, multi-agency plan to reduce the rat population. 
 
 Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday the plan will target rats in the Grand Concourse area of the Bronx; Chinatown, the East Village and the Lower East Side in Manhattan; and the Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant areas of Brooklyn. 
 
 By September, the city will start installing solar compactors with rat-resistant openings and replacing wire waste baskets with steel cans. 
 
 It also plans to cement basement floors in public housing. 
 
 Proposed legislation would regulate the hours garbage could be left at the curb, and increase fines for illegal dumping. 
 
 In February, health officials said one person had died and two others were severely sickened in a Bronx neighborhood due to a rare disease transmitted by rats. 

 The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s approach to counting rodents involves the use of what it calls “rat indexing” to inspect multiple properties in areas on which it concentrates. The agency tells owners to hire exterminators if its inspectors find evidence of rats on their premises, and can issue violation notices if follow-up inspections indicate a lack of compliance. It also holds training courses for building superintendents, property managers, homeowners and even interested tenants. 
 
 The health department says its efforts have paid off. “We have seen an overall decrease in the number of active rat signs throughout New York City,” Levi Fishman, the deputy press secretary for the department, said in an email. 
 
 How much of a decrease? Mr. Fishman said that “there are no scientific methods for being able to accurately count the number of rats in New York or any large city.” Similarly, Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is well steeped in the battle against rodents, said it had never quantified the rat population living in the subway system. 
 
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 Mr. Auerbach, who was a fiscal analyst for the City Council and for the New York City Labor Market Information Service at the City University of New York before enrolling at Columbia, acknowledged in his paper that conducting a rat census posed significant challenges for a statistician. “Animals are terrible survey respondents,” he noted dryly. 
 
 He faced other methodological problems. He could not capture a large number of rats, mark them for identification purposes, release them, capture a second batch and count the number of marked rats in that batch. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, the health department “is unlikely to approve a large-scale rat-releasing experiment (I know, because I asked).” 
 
 Instead, Mr. Auerbach relied on information about rat complaints gathered from 311 call logs, which is publicly available on the city’s data portal. He correlated the location of each reported sighting to the corresponding building lot and concluded that there were 40,500 rat-inhabited lots in New York, or about 4.75 percent of the city’s 842,000 lots. 
 
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 “We know that 40 to 50 rats belong to a typical colony,” he wrote. Assuming — “quite generously” — that the larger number was reasonable, he put the rat population at 2.02 million. 
 
 The idea that the rat population is smaller than eight million is not news, according to Robert Sullivan, who wrote the book on rats — literally. The title was “Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants.” 
 
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 “Anybody who knows anything about rats knows there aren’t eight million rats,” Mr. Sullivan said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “but anybody who knows anything about rats knows that everybody loves the idea of eight million rats. The one-rat-per-person scenario is too good.” 
 
 Even so, he noted that the theory was disproved after World War II by the animal behaviorist David E. Davis, who trapped rats in apartments in East Harlem and estimated that, at the time, the city was home to one rat for every 36 people. 
 
 Mr. Auerbach’s paper was one of three finalists judged by a panel of professional statisticians. He was invited to speak at the society’s annual conference in Sheffield, England, in September. 
 
 The audience, he said, “had a lot of questions about assumptions — do my assumptions hold given the data set? 
 
 “At the end, I gave a challenge: ‘Let’s see someone do better.’ I didn’t try to sell the work as a biologist understanding a species. We’re all taxpayers. We pay for services. The government is releasing data. How can we use the data to engage the agencies and talk about the services they provide?” 

 New Yorkers and rats have been living side-by-side since Peter Minuet rode into New Amsterdam on the back of one, but it appears some New Yorkers don't enjoy engaging in constant battle with rodents while, say, taking out the trash, or sleeping. Today Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $32 million escalation in the war on rats, which aims to reduce rat populations in the rodent-heavy Grand Concourse section of the Bronx, Chinatown/Lower East Side/East Village in Manhattan, and Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. De Blasio says he hopes the carnage will engulf 70 percent of rat populations in these neighborhoods. Sorry Zardulu, all your friends will probably die. 
 
 The plan will employ a number of measures in an effort to mitigate rat populations. First, the city plans to purchase 336 new trash receptacles with "mail-box" openings so rats can't get into them, and all wire trash cans in those neighborhoods will be swapped out for big belly steel cans. The city will also increase trash pickup in the targeted zones, and the Department of Sanitation will pick up trash in city parks on a daily basis. And the plan includes the proposal of a local law requiring buildings with more than 10 units in those neighborhoods to curb their trash after 4 a.m. on trash collection days to minimize rat buffets, though even that won't faze the toughest rodent. 
 
 The city also intends to replace the basement flooring in some NYCHA buildings with concrete "rat pads" to make spaces less hospitable for rats, since in the Year 2017, some of these buildings still have DIRT basements, plus they'll invest in new NYCHA trash compactors. The Health Department will work with the Department of Buildings, Sanitation Department, and Housing and Preservation Department to inspect private buildings in rat-heavy zones and force landlords to make repairs and necessary exterminations, and Sanitation will embark on an illegal dumping enforcement blitz at certain NYCHA facilities. The city also plans to work with City Council to come up with new and improved rat-mitigating laws, which will include enrolling certain buildings into organics collection and curbing trash. 
 
 At a press conference today, the Mayor showed off the new trash cans, doled out some fun facts about rats (they only need to eat an ounce of food a day!) and urged city residents to call 311 to report rat sightings, which seems a tad time-consuming considering nobody seems to know how many rats even live in this godforsaken place. (According to one estimate, somewhere around 2 million.) 
 
 De Blasio also noted that he has seen "many a rat" in the city. "I know I've seen plenty this year. I see them in the parks, and in the subway," de Blasio said. Not even the Upper East Side has been spared their scourge—the mayor says he saw one in Carl Schurz Park, though he couldn't recall the date. And though he wants this battle won, he is wary of the bloodshed. "We're kind to rats," he said. "We just want them to go away." 
 
 Some of the initiatives have already started rolling out, but the Mayor says the new trash can plan will roll out in September. Enjoy your Viral Rat Videos while you can.
– New York City has announced a $32 million, multi-agency plan to reduce the rat population, which is estimated to number roughly 2 million and has included the likes of pizza rat. Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday the plan will target rats in the Grand Concourse area of the Bronx; Chinatown, the East Village and the Lower East Side in Manhattan; and the Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant areas of Brooklyn. The goal, per NBC New York: up to a 70% drop in the rat population in those areas. By September, the city will start installing solar compactors with rat-resistant openings and replacing wire waste baskets with steel cans, reports the AP. It also plans to cement basement floors in public housing, where some floors are currently dirt ones, notes Gothamist. Proposed legislation would regulate the hours garbage could be left at the curb, and increase fines for illegal dumping. It doesn't take much to sustain a rat, Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia notes: They can survive on an ounce of food daily. In February, health officials said one person had died and two others were severely sickened in a Bronx neighborhood due to a rare disease transmitted by rats.