New York City declares war on rats with multimillion-dollar plan

New York City on Wednesday announced a pricey plan to reduce the rat population by 70 per cent in the city's three most infested neighbourhoods by the end of 2018.

The three targeted neighbourhoods are in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

Rats are seen as a public health threat as carriers of disease and as a plague on the quality of life. Since the beginning of 2017, the New York City health department has received more than 10,000 complaints of rat sightings, and more than 15 per cent of the more than 24,000 properties inspected in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx showed "active rat signs," the mayor's office said.

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"We refuse to accept rats as a normal part of living in New York City," Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.

The $32 million US (more than $40 million Cdn) plan will begin to roll out in September, and multiple city agencies, including the sanitation, parks and health departments, will be involved.

Most of the money will be spent on improvements in public housing apartment buildings, replacing dirt basement floors with concrete pads and installing solar trash compactors with a "mail-box" opening to replace the 20-year-old compactors now in use.

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Wire waste baskets on city streets will be replaced with new steel ones. Both the new trash compactors and new trash baskets will dramatically diminish rats' access to food sources.

"The best way to eliminate rats is to deprive them of food, including garbage in homes and litter on New York City streets," sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia said in the statement.

The city had cut its budget for rodent control programs in 2010 to help reduce its overall deficit, but four years later, with estimates of two million rats sharing space with the city's population of eight million, the health department started a program targeting rat colonies.