Get Me In The Rat Zone, Says 200+ Prospect Heights Residents

PROSPECT HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN —Prospect Heights has so many rats that, instead of the classic "birds and the bees" talk, parents are having the "please don't play with the squished rat" chat.

And neighbors are fed up. At least a few hundred of them.

Over 200 Prospect Heights neighbors submitted testimony demanding the city recognize the neighborhood for what they claim it really is: one of the most rat-infested neighborhoods in the city.

"I literally need to instruct my kids to scoot around dead rats in the street and sidewalk," said one resident.

One neighbor said that her toddler was admiring a flower in the seemingly bucolic neighborhood recently when a rat popped out of nowhere in the middle of the day.

"I had to grab my child and get her away," said the mom. "It is way too close for comfort and totally disgusting, especially seeing the squished rats in the streets."

Countless testimonies cite rats gnawing on car wires, running over feet, swarming in "rat packs" and even one neighbor who said she witnessed rodents seemingly gleeful about their ratty paradise — or maybe celebrating their dominion over the simple human.

"One day last year when I looked out of my bedroom window onto the yard, I witness[ed] three or four rats running up and down, jumping and having fun," a sight that left the Prospect Heights resident in a state of "shock and unbelief."

225 people in total submitted testimony to the Department of Health hearing on Thursday about new rules governing the revived Rat Mitigation Zones, part of the "Rat Pack" stack of City Council bills passed last fall which allows the city to take off the kid gloves when dealing with the despised rodent.

But just like in 2017 when these zones were first declared under former Mayor Bill de Blasio's $32 million war-on-rats, Prospect Heights found themselves iced out, despite being one of the rattiest neighborhoods citywide for years, according to city 311 data.

Rat organizer Carol Morrison, an artist and social worker, has been trying to get the neighborhood to join the rat zone since 2018 and begging the city to go after absentee landlords who rather pay insignificant city fines than clean up their rat friendly buildings.

"In 2018, when my neighborhood in [ZIP code] 11238 had the worst infestation and the most 311 calls in New York, we were ignored," she told Patch, but this time she said she is "cautiously optimistic."

One of the reasons is the huge reaction from her neighbors.

Jesse Hendrich, co-founders of the Sterling Committee on Rat Awareness and Mitigation, or SCRAM, helped send a template out to neighbors that was written by Council Member Crystal Hudson's Rat Task Force, which Hendrich also serves on. State Assembly Member Robert Carroll shared it, too.

Hendrich noted that Prospect Heights is mentioned in the rat mitigation map published in the City Record, but is not on the map.

The Department of Health confirmed to Patch that the maps, aside from the addition of Harlem, are the same as the ones from 2017, meaning still no Prospect Heights.

“Rats can’t tell time, and they can’t read maps — but neither can Mayor Adams," Hendrich said. "Prospect Heights is named as part of the rat mitigation zone — but it’s not on the proposed map — and it must be included."

At the virtual hearing on Thursday morning, only two New Yorkers testified, both from Prospect and Crown Heights.

"We are completely overrun with rats," said Jared Safarti, who lives in Crown Heights near Bedford Avenue.

He cited a blame-game between the DOH and the Department of Sanitation and called for better interagency cooperation, something Morrison has spent years asking for — and something the rat czar was hired to solve — as well as higher fines on dirty landlords.

Prospect Heights resident Allie Mintz said in the year she has lived on her block of St. Johns Place, she can't "walk down by block from five p.m. until morning without running into literally packs of rats."

"I've never seen anything like it," she said. "What we have is just an absolute health hazard."

"I'm just struggling to understand why we're not part of the rat mitigation zone," Mintz said, adding that she fears the problem will only get worse if rats were mitigated from surrounding areas and rat refugees found refuge in Prospect Heights.

"We desperately need help from the city," she said.

While Morrison said she is happy that there is a renewed focus on rats from city hall, she says there's not a lot of good news when it comes to rats.

"We lost a lot of ground during the pandemic—to the rats. The statistics don’t bode well for the future, and I am really worried about our projected hotter summers and increased times for reproduction," she told Patch.