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Why Chicago is Losing the War on Rats
The “rattiest city in America” can’t keep up with skyrocketing rodent complaints
By Casey Toner and Mina Bloom | August 31, 2023
https://illinoisanswers.org/2023/08/31/why-chicago-is-losing-the-war-on-rats/
The “rattiest city in America” can’t keep up with skyrocketing rodent complaints
By Casey Toner and Mina Bloom | August 31, 2023
Before moving into an apartment in Ukrainian Village last May, Liz Murray asked her new landlord if the vintage building had any rat problems.
The landlord assured her the six-flat, built in the early 1900s, was free of rodents, adding that pest control “routinely checks” for signs of infestations.
Months later, Murray found out none of that was true.
In the spring, Murray’s then 15-year-old daughter heard clattering from their kitchen cabinets. At first Murray thought little of it, but her daughter was worried, so Murray set up a camera in the kitchen.
Turns out the camera wasn’t needed. As Murray was calling 311 one day for help, a rat shot across her apartment floor. The building’s maintenance man found their apparent entryway — a hole behind Murray’s kitchen cabinets, covered in rat droppings. Not long after, a neighbor across the hall reported he had caught two rats in his apartment.
Murray, 40, repeatedly turned to her landlord and the city for help, but her pleas to fix the persistent rat problem were rejected or ignored, leaving her “flabbergasted,” she said.
“When I spoke to [a city employee], I said, ‘This is a safety issue, you guys aren’t helping me. What can you do?’ They said, ‘You can try to talk to your landlord again, and I was like, ‘Who can help me have a safe place to live? I don’t have a safe, clean space, which is what I was guaranteed,’” she said.
Murray is hardly alone. An investigation by the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago shows that since the beginning of the pandemic, record rat complaints have overwhelmed city services. The city’s resources are stretched thin, and so many residents have complained that the city’s Inspector General’s office is auditing the Bureau of Rodent Control.
Last year, Chicagoans made more than 50,000 rat complaints, a slight decline from the prior two years but still significantly more complaints than in recent years, according to data from the city’s 311 call center.
An investigation by Illinois Answers and Block Club has found that the city is ill-prepared to handle the surge of complaints. The city bureau tapped to combat rodents is short staffed and often days or weeks late in responding to complaints; its yard inspection service is limited in hours and excludes more than a third of Chicago homes. City loopholes also allow for major construction projects to begin without first addressing rat infestations. On the enforcement end, the city’s attempts to reign in the biggest violators with fines are often futile. In one instance, companies managed by a north suburban woman have incurred more than $15 million in unpaid, rat-related tickets on Chicago properties.
Most people, in fact, don’t pay their fines. The city has issued 117,000 rat-related tickets since 2019 totaling $153 million — with more than $126 million in ticket debt outstanding, according to an analysis of city data.
Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Cole Stallard and Rodent Control Deputy Commissioner Josie Cruz declined requests for an interview.
In emailed statements, a rodent control spokesperson noted that the requests for rodent abatement are “trending back towards pre-pandemic levels” even with the loss of staff, which the city attributes in part to retirements and transfers. The bureau increased its garbage cart replacement budget this year from $3.3 million to $4 million to stop rats from feasting inside broken garbage bins, records show.
But experts say the city’s efforts are no match for the city’s outsized rat problem. Chicago has topped pest control company Orkin’s list for rattiest city in the country for eight consecutive years.
“We’re outnumbered at this point. We’re way outnumbered,” said Janelle Iaccino, marketing director for Rose Pest Control. “It doesn’t give us much hope for coming down in the ranks for rattiest city.”
In Chicago and other cities across the country, rats are an inescapable part of everyday life. No matter where people live, they're likely to see rats scurrying across sidewalks and alleys and zipping into trash cans, searching for their next meal.
There's only one species in Chicago: The Norway rat. Female rats can give birth to more than 50 offspring per year. And several months after being born, female rats can reproduce. In the right environment, zoologists say, two rats can turn into several thousand over a year.
The high rate of reproduction is one reason the city can sometimes feel overrun by rats.
Rats can chew through electrical wires and destroy property, and while many people find them gross, they also pose serious health risks. The rats found in urban areas are “loaded with” diseases, said New York-based rodentologist Bobby Corrigan, who has studied rats for more than 30 years.
They carry a bacterial disease called leptospirosis, which can cause acute kidney failure and liver disease in pets. Records show that at least three people have reported since 2019 that it killed their dogs.
One of those people was Jennifer Bandola. She and her husband, Doug, lived in a house in the 1600 block of West Belle Plaine and had repeatedly called the city in 2020 to take care of a rat’s nest in their backyard, but nothing worked.
That same year, they adopted an 8-week-old bernedoodle, Georgia, and brought her home to their Lakeview home. Not long after, the puppy contracted leptospirosis and died.
“We didn’t have her very long, it was only a couple weeks,” she said. “She was just a sweet little dog who would walk around with her mouth open and wait to bite you.”
After Georgia died, they dug up the backyard flower bed where the rats lived and continued to call 311 to kill the rat’s nest, but the rats persisted. Heartbroken, the Bandolas left Chicago and moved to Bloomington-Normal.
“There is definitely something that needs to be done about the rats,” she said. “If it’s not the city who is responsible for it, I don’t know who is.”
Chicagoans have explored myriad approaches to kill the rats: dry ice, rat poison, garbage can repairs, taking a hands-off approach to urban coyotes, an army of feral cats that has also proved effective at killing songbirds. But what the situation actually demands is cleanliness because rats are only after one thing: food.
“Everyone thinks you get an exterminator, put out some poison, when in fact it’s not going to do much at all unless you correct that simple kindergarten lesson of keeping your place clean,” Corrigan said.
Chicago could benefit by following the lead of other cities that are attacking aggressive rat populations in new and interesting ways, experts say.
New York City recently hired its first-ever “Rat Czar,” Kathleen Corradi, to fight the city’s ongoing rat problem during an increase in rat sightings during the pandemic. City officials said New York City has seen a reduction in rat complaints after Corradi and her team focused on getting trash off the streets and out of the city’s waste stream.
In Somerville, Mass., a city of about 80,000, officials are using a new technology, called SMART Boxes, to reduce the rat population. The above-ground boxes trap rats and electrocute them but pose no risk to humans or pets, offering a safe alternative to poison and other traditional bait.
Colin Zeigler, Somerville’s environmental health coordinator, said the boxes are appealing in part because they collect data and send it to city officials wirelessly so they can look at trends.
Meanwhile in Chicago, city leaders haven’t announced a plan to address the rat complaints or even acknowledged there’s a problem, but the inspector general's office agreed to audit the Department of Rodent Control in January after it “received multiple complaints about the efficiency and effectiveness of the city’s rat abatement program,” according to the office's annual plan. The audit will examine response times to rat complaints and determine whether rodent control’s services are equitable and follow best practices.
The Bureau of Rodent Control has blown its stated goal of responding to each 311 complaint within five days in each of the last two years, according to an analysis of 311 data. It took more than 8 1/2 days to close out the median complaint last year and 10 days the year before, with some West and South side neighborhoods such as North Lawndale and Washington Heights taking more than two weeks to get complaints closed in recent years. At the same time, staffing at the bureau is down about a quarter of its employees since 2019, city records show. A rodent control spokesperson suggested that the drop isn’t that great, noting, among other reasons, that some employees were inactive or on leave for part of that time.
Geraldine Powell, a laborer with the bureau who retired last year, said the surge in complaints combined with the staffing shortages have stretched the city’s response times.
“You do as much as you can in the hours you have,” she said.
https://illinoisanswers.org/2023/08/31/why-chicago-is-losing-the-war-on-rats/
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