Bed-Stuy Sees Hundreds More Rats In 2021 Than Year Before: Data

BED-STUY, BROOKLYN — As rat sightings surge across New York City, and the country, this year, Bed-Stuy has been no exception.

The neighborhood's Community District 3 has seen hundreds more rat sightings this year compared to 2020, recording more than 1,200 with more than a month to go in 2021, 311 data shows.

The neighborhood's 1,286 rat sightings between Jan. 1 and Nov. 9 of this year is a 32 percent increase from the 977 sightings in the same time period in 2020.

And the surge isn't just the return of Brooklynites noticing the critters after emerging from 2020 quarantine.

In fact, while much of the city saw a dip in sightings in 2020, sightings in Bed-Stuy went up. In 2019, before the pandemic, there were only 876 during the time period, 47 percent less than this year's numbers, data shows.

The local spike come as rat sightings across Brooklyn and New York City surge this year.

Sharing Apartments

So, where exactly are neighbors in Crown and Prospect Heights noticing their fellow city dwellers?

According to 311, most of the neighborhood's rodents are found where its residents are — in apartment buildings.

Of the 1,286 sightings across Community Board 3, a whopping 867 of them have been in apartment or mixed-use buildings, data shows.

Vacant buildings and lots had the next-most sightings, accounting for 98 of the 311 calls. Another 39 were at construction sites, 27 in commercial buildings and 234 were marked in the "other" category on 311, according to the data.

It seems almost no blocks are immune from the sightings, though some clusters appear in the western part of the neighborhood. Here's a look at where they've been this year:

Neighborhood by Neighborhood

Despite the spike, Bed-Stuy was among neighborhoods where rat sightings have surged the least in the borough.

The largest spike was in Southern Brooklyn's Community District 15, where sightings increased by 167 percent. Park Slope's Community Board 6 was the next-highest, followed by Flatbush's Community Board 14, where sightings increased by 111 percent.

Nearby Crown and Prospect Heights also saw sightings of the rodents nearly double this year.

Only one of the borough's 18 community districts saw a decrease in the sightings between the two years, and in all but four that surge was more than 50 percent, data shows.

As a whole, rat sightings in Brooklyn were up by 54 percent in 2021 when compared to the same time period in 2020, data shows. In fact, Brooklyn reported the most sightings of the five boroughs so far this year, according to a Renthop study.

But Brooklyn is far from alone.

Citywide, the more than 25,000 reports of rat sightings across the five boroughs so far this year is a nearly 29 percent increase from those in 2020, according to the RentHop study.

Part of the spike can be attributed to the fact that rat sightings took a nose dive during the coronavirus pandemic. When New York City first went into lockdown and city dwellers were justifiably more perturbed by COVID-19 than rats, monthly complaints were hundreds less than previous years.

Experts have said the surge in 2021 is likely due to a confluence of factors related to the pandemic, including health inspectors being reassigned away from rat-patrol duty over to mass-vaccination sites; an unusually wet summer; and the closure of restaurants during the early days of COVID-19, which forced rats to scavenge outside more.