Rat Sightings More Than Doubled In Park Slope Area In 2021: Data

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — As rat sightings surge across New York City, and the country, almost no area in Brooklyn has seen a bigger spike in the rodents than Park Slope.

Park Slope's Community Board 6 has seen a 113 percent increase in rat sightings this year compared to 2020, a bigger surge than all but one other community board in the borough, according to 311 data.

And the surge isn't just the return of Park Slopers noticing the critters after emerging from 2020 quarantine. The 615 sightings so far in 2021 are also a 60 percent increase from pre-pandemic 2019 numbers, data shows.

"I think they are pretty much everywhere," Mark Caserta, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District, told Patch this week.

Caserta said the BID hasn't directly gotten complaints about rats, which is likely because the majority of sightings have been in residential, not commercial, buildings. But he said noticing more of the rodents has been a topic of conversation among neighbors recently.

Sharing Apartments

So, where exactly are neighbors 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 615 complaints in CB6 between Jan. 1 and Nov. 9, a whopping 363 of them have been in apartment complexes. Another 26 have been in mixed-use buildings and 28 have been in commercial buildings, data shows.

Construction sites and vacant lots or buildings had a combined 48 sightings this year. Another 133 of the sightings were in the "other" category on 311.

Caserta predicts the sightings in Park Slope specifically will pick up even more when construction starts on the Key Food on Fifth Avenue redevelopment project.

Neighborhood to Neighborhood

In Community Board 6, most of the sightings are, unsurprisingly, found in the ZIP code that takes up the majority of the district, 11215.

Of the CB6 sightings, 243 were in 11215, which includes Park Slope and parts of Gowanus. Another 191 were in northern Park Slope's 11217 ZIP code and 150 originated in 11231, which includes Carroll Gardens and Red Hook.

Here's a look at where all the sightings have been this year:

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.

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.

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

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.

Have you noticed more rats in the neighborhood? Send that and other tips to Anna.quinn@patch.com.