This neighborhood is totally rat-tled.
Rat sightings are trending down citywide but some neighborhoods are seeing massive spikes — with one area in Queens hit with a 119% increase in 311 complaints about the vermin last year.
“Every house has rats and nobody is doing anything about it,” said Shuvro Md, of Jamaica Hills, Queens. That neighborhood part of the borough’s Community Board 8 — alongside Briarwood, Hillcrest, Holliswood and more — which saw the whopping increase from 2023 to 2024.
“In my apartment, I put down glue traps,” Md told The Post. “Every morning I see two or three on them, but I still have a lot running around.
“I want [the city] to do something about it,” the 39-year-old marketing consulting company owner added. “I have my kid in my apartment. It’s not good for our health. They can get into our food.”
Trailing behind Queens CB 8 on the list of districts with the highest rat report increases year-over-year are Bronx CB 10 in City Island / Throggs Neck area, which saw a 30.86% increase; and Brooklyn’s CB 7 (Sunset Park) and CB 14 (Flatbush), which saw rat reports up 35.46% and 57.04%, respectively.
The increases come despite rat sightings trending downwards overall, with citywide 311 rat reports falling 24% in a colder-than-usual January compared to the year before, according to the Department of Sanitation.
But year-over-year from 2023 to 2024, citywide 311 complaints for rat sightings only decreased about 1%, according to 311 data, which dropped from 25,446 to 25,190 total complaints.
Rat sightings called to 311 fell in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island over the same period — while the same kinds of reports shot up by 6.77 and 6.3% in Queens and the Bronx, respectively.
Sanitation spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said 2024 data may not yet reflect the effects of a new waste containerization rule that requires all buildings with one to nine residential units to put their trash in sealed containers.
The effort began in January 2025 – and fines can’t be enforced until April 1, the spokesperson said.
“Currently, 70 percent of New York City trash is in containers,” Gragnani told The Post in a statement. “And we have a plan for the remaining 30 percent, using stationary on-street containers for large residential buildings, starting with a rollout in West Harlem this spring.”
But some Jamaica Hills residents, like 25-year-old Tanya, said rats are still “everywhere,” despite the resident having her own “rat-resistant” closed trash can — which individually retails for about $50.
“We tried to get those [trash bins] that close but they are expensive. We have one,” Tanya said. “We should have multiple, but we can only afford one.”
College student Maritza Balbuena, who has lived with her parents in an apartment building in Briarwood since 2021, said the city’s new bins have made a “big” difference in her block’s rat problem.
“People were throwing their trash outside the building and in the lobby and it attracted rats and they were going into the apartments,” Balbuena, 19, said. “The city gave us garbage cans and that helped a lot. The owner spoke with the tenants so everything is cleaner now than before.”
By borough, Brooklyn rat sightings decreased .8%, Staten Island fell 2% and Manhattan saw a11.5% drop between 2023 and 2024 — all while the city launched the containerization effort, a “Rat Pack” and even held a National Urban Rat Summit.
Community boards representing Midtown, Greenwich Village/NoHo and Queens’ Bay Terrace saw some of the largest improvement year-over-year, with reports declining 66.21%, 37.59% and 34.71%, respectively.
But rats remain a fact of life even in the areas where reported sightings have decreased.
Manhattan health care worker Isa Almanzar, blames construction on a new 64-story residential skyscraper, for a rat explosion next to her home in the Financial District.
“Now, I take out my trash and there’s a rat inside it, which I never had before this started,” said the 33-year-old resident, who has lived in her building for five years.
The property is sandwiched by the construction site and also a migrant shelter next door, which has contributed to excess garbage on the streets, she said.
Construction “proliferates all kinds of pests,” Almanzar said.
“It’s a perfect hive.”
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