New York City—like other American municipalities—is facing a rat problem. There were 2,350 reported rat sightings in May 2023 alone, which, while down from the year before, is still higher than it has been in the past decade. Rats harm public health by increasing illness and stress, damage infrastructure, and add costs for cities, businesses, and residents. Although the rat problem can seem daunting, cities can meaningfully address it. But what do cities need to do?
Monthly Rat Sightings in New York City
SOURCE: Rat Sightings (NYC Open Data), accessed October 20, 2023.
Our own work on this history of how local governments created garbage collection and disposal programs offers lessons that carry forward across time. In the late nineteenth century, American cities grew rapidly. Traditional, individual ways of disposing of trash—burning, burying, or feeding to pigs—did not work well anymore with so many people living so close together. Cities at the time—like cities today—struggled with how to address a problem affecting its residents. Looking in depth at what American cities did and how they did it, revealed five factors officials can use to address a public problem like rats.
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Technical expertise and skills
To solve a problem, government officials need experts to provide information about what to do and how. Rat problems are complicated, but they are not unsolvable. Experts detail the strategies to remove rats currently living in cities and prevent future rat infestations. Scientists argue that a reactive approach, such as extermination once there is an infestation, is too little too late. Instead, they recommend removing rats’ primary food source, human food waste, through strategies like tight-fitting trash containers. The solutions are out there; they just don’t always become realized.
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Political will
Just because there is a known solution does not mean that anything will be done about it. City officials must have the political will to propose and implement solutions to address it. Cities might not have funds, might not want to allocate funds for this problem among the array of challenges in front of them, or the current government might not benefit politically from the investment. Rats have roamed American cities for decades. Some cities have mounted the political will to target the problem with new offices or agencies. New York City created a rat control committee under Mayor William O’Dwyer and a rodent extermination task force under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. More recently, Mayor Eric Adams named a “rat czar,” while Boston proposed a similar position. To solve problems, political officials need to dedicate political capital in the short- and long-term.
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Ability/capacity
Once cities decide to take up a new program, they need to invest in the infrastructure to carry it out. They might need to borrow capacity by contracting out to a company that has those resources or is willing to invest. To reduce pests, New York City is reconsidering its trash collection programs, requiring food business to put their refuse in bins not bags. These new policies require the city’s sanitation providers to make changes also to the people and trucks that they use to collect trash.
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Resident compliance
A city can establish the most state-of-the-art infrastructure, such as putting containers in parking spots alongside curbs, but if residents don’t put their trash in the containers as instructed, then the whole program can fail. Residents are accustomed to the habits they have around how they dispose of trash. They may be reluctant to comply with new rules. It’s up to the city to instill new habits. That might mean teaching new garbage can practices in the schools and having the kids bring these practices home, as in Columbus, or creating catchy infographics that explain the new procedures, or using mild social pressure to increase uptake.
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Political cover
When cities declare a rat problem, it’s important to not dwell on the rats as the source of the troubles. A rat problem is a public problem that requires public officials to deliver solutions. When public agencies fail to live up to their obligations, they tend to cast about for someone to blame—negligent garbage collectors, noncomplying residents, or rats.
Even though political officials have tried for decades to control rats, the problem is difficult to solve because better rat control means changing human behavior. It’s much harder to get political leaders to invest in and individuals to change the way they’ve always done things. People told to use a garbage can might think it is someone else’s job to eradicate the rats, and they may resent the new obligations—to purchase a can and to make room for it in their building—required by a local government they may not trust. Nineteenth-century officials, too, struggled to change residents’ behavior when residents resisted these new programs. Mayoral administrations had to convince individuals that trash collection was a worthy project, and they had to educate them about how to participate. These officials were successful, and, today, many of the systems of waste management in place are directly the result of their efforts. The municipal trash problem more than a century ago offers lessons for today’s municipal rat problem: public problems can be addressed, and public officials can rely on five factors to do so.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Patricia Strach is professor of political science and public administration & policy at the University at Albany and fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government
Kathleen Sullivan is associate professor of political science at Ohio University