To get a sense of New York’s reinvigorated campaign, declared in November of 2022 with a tranche of anti-rodent legislation, the Rat Academy is a good enough place to start. There we were—young and old, landlords and tenants, rodenticide enthusiasts and professional rubberneckers—huddled in the basement of a Department of Health and Mental Hygiene building in East Harlem on the last day of May, getting to know our enemy. Their impressive birthrates, their stupendous gnawing strength, the trigger hairs on their heads that give them a feeling of safety under bricks and in cramped burrows. Kathleen Corradi, the city’s Rat Czar, was there to bless the proceedings. A good-looking blonde guy seated in front of me with a notepad turned out to be a reporter for a Danish newspaper. The presence of the Scandinavian media at this humble seminar is what’s known in the pest control business as a “sign”—that New York is at least winning the public relations side of this latest War on Rats.
What you quickly learn is that the rat problem is really a trash problem. Alone among great cities, New York City residents and businesses drag some forty-four million pounds of garbage to the sidewalk every evening, providing the rats a situation that evokes Templeton’s binge at the fairgrounds in Charlotte’s Web.
One of the first salvos in Mayor Adams’s renewed campaign to take back the city was the announcement that set-out times for this black-bagged waste would be rolled back four hours, to 8 p.m. Of course, rats don’t mind dining on a European schedule. The mailers and bus ads promoting the new rules featured a morose grey rodent dragging a big, gaudy suitcase. “Send Rats Packing!” it announced. A T-shirt ($48) offered by the Department of Sanitation proclaims: “Rats don’t run this city. We Do.”
This and other rhetoric of the War on Rats comes uncomfortably close to anti-immigrant sloganeering and racist cartoons of the not-so-distant past, whipping up public opinion against “enemy populations” to justify corrective regimes—from the rodent abatement industry’s latest traps and poisons to advanced garbage receptacles. Nobody but the rats wants trash-strewn streets. But the patently absurd and endless war on these maligned creatures obscures the fact that any real gains will require systemic changes in urban infrastructure. The sanitation department’s first detailed study of the viability of containerization concluded last year that a complete overhaul of residential garbage collection—made possible by as-yet-undeveloped bins and trucks—could keep 89 percent of the city’s household refuse out of rodents’ reach. Promises and press releases abound, but the chance of such an overhaul actually coming to pass is slim. (...)
The theory of broken windows comes down to aesthetics—a taste for the appearance of order. In this way, the government acts like a neighborhood association with a monopoly on lethal force. And indeed, Giuliani’s tough-guy talk encouraged a level of racist brutality in the enforcement of a program that, on paper, is less a crime-busting blueprint than a way to strengthen the self-regulation of subjective community norms. Like Giuliani’s vendetta against Squeegee Men, the fight against the Murine Menace demands quick, visible busts, producing the feeling of safety, security, and cleanliness while conveniently downplaying the roots of the problem.
Adams has stationed cops on the subway platforms to make people feel “safe”—that is, if you’re the kind of person comforted by cops. He has gathered the unhoused into shelters, partly for their sake, partly for appearances. “The mayor has depicted the city’s rat situation much as he has portrayed its crime and homelessness issues,” writes the New York Times. “He says all illustrate a sense of disorder that Mr. Adams hopes to tamp down.” Indeed, “distasteful, worrisome encounters” certainly describes the experiences of New Yorkers who complain of rodents scampering over mountains of trash and between disused dining sheds. One spokesperson at the Rat Academy compared chasing rats from their nests to illegal evictions—presumably something both landlords and tenants could relate to. If you came home and your locks had been changed, would you give up? No. But if it happened every day, for two weeks . . . (...)
Who benefits from this forever war? The political sugar rush is already hitting. It’s an aesthetic contest, after all—the trick is visible change, a feeling that there is less trash and fewer rats. You may not necessarily notice a lack. You do notice a shiny new container with a tight-fitting lid where once there were mountains of seeping, rustling bags. But the problem with this style of perpetual, piecemeal warfare is that containerization must be consistent, covering residential and commercial, from house to house and block to block—or else the rats will simply adjust their habits. And here, the problem is not just our overwhelming failure to sensibly dispose of our garbage, it’s that we produce too much of it.
