Chinatown Rats: Neighborhoods To Get Millions To Fight Infestation

CHINATOWN, NY — Chinatown and other neighborhoods in New York City will get millions of dollars to fight persistent rat infestations, the mayor announced on Wednesday.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the $32 million plan on Wednesday morning to tackle one of the city's most persistent problems in the neighborhoods where rats have long congregated. The money, which will fund a slew of new initiatives including upgraded trash cans and changes to trash pickup, could reduce the rat population by up to 70 percent in the areas affected, the mayor's office claimed. The money will fund a host of new steps to tackle rodents in three of the city's most rat-infested areas: in Chinatown, the East Village and the Lower East Side, in Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and in the Grand Concourse area of the Bronx.

De Blasio said that the new initiatives, which will be rolled out to other neighborhoods if they prove effective in the first three, would be a drastic step-up from the city's current rat-prevention initiative, which he compared to scooping water out of a leaky, sinking boat.

"It's like you'd get the water out for a while and it would just come back," he said. "We were not, as a city, solving the problem."

A main arm of the rat-prevention program will involve changing the way trash is handled in the three areas. The city is purchasing 336 solar compactors — which de Blasio promised are completely rat-proof and cost about $7,000 a piece — and will replace the wire trash baskets on city streets with steel cans in the affected neighborhoods. The mayor's office expects the steel cans to help reduce rats access to food. In addition, the plan calls for more frequent trash pickup in the most rat-prone areas.

A separate arm of the project will tackle rodent-infestations in public housing, by replacing the dirt floors that still exist in the basements of some NYCHA buildings with cement. Public housing complexes in the neighborhoods will also get new trash compactors.

De Blasio's initiative also calls for a new law that will increase fines for illegal trash dumping and regulate when larger buildings are permitted to curb their garbage.

Image credit: AP Photo/Frank Franklin II.