Rat Sightings Soar In Crown, Prospect Heights In 2021: Data

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — As rat sightings surge across New York City, and the country, this year, only a few areas in Brooklyn have seen a bigger spike in the rodents than Prospect and Crown Heights.

Community Boards 8 and 9 — which cover Prospect, Crown Heights and Prospect Lefferts Gardens — have seen a combined 87 percent increase in rat sightings this year compared to 2020, a bigger surge than most other community board in the borough, according to 311 data.

And the surge isn't just the return of Brooklynites noticing the critters after emerging from 2020 quarantine. The 1,355 sightings so far in 2021 are also a 55 percent increase from pre-pandemic 2019 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 1,355 sightings across both community boards between Jan. 1 and Nov. 9, a whopping 1,027 of them have been in apartment or mixed-use buildings, data shows.

Across both districts, commercial buildings had a combined 36 sightings this year, vacant lots had 30, construction sites saw 19 and 211 were marked in the "other" category on 311.

It seems almost no blocks are immune from the sightings, though they do appear to be concentrated in the north eastern part of the neighborhoods. Here's a look at where they've been this year:

Neighborhood by Neighborhood

Most of the 2021 sightings in the two neighborhoods, 926, originated in Community Board 8, which covers northern Crown Heights and Prospect Heights.

The district had hundreds more rat sightings than CB9 in all three years analyzed, according to the data. The district also had the largest increase, with rat sightings surging 93 percent from 2021 to 2020, data shows.

Community Board 9 — which includes the southern portion of Crown Heights and Prospect Lefferts Gardens — has had 429 sightings so far this year, a 77 percent increase from 2020, 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.

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. Park Slope's 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.