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He’s losing the rat race.
Rodent complaints have spiked nearly 8% across New York City since Mayor Eric Adams took office — despite his ballyhooed multi-million dollar war on rats and vow from Day One to make headway against the vermin, troubling 311 data shows.
There were 41,748 rat sightings and other vermin-related complaints made through the city’s 311 hotline in 2023, up 1.5% from 41,120 a year before; up 7.6% percent from the 38,809 complaints fielded in 2021 during Bill de Blasio’s final year as mayor; and 32% more than the 31,644 complaints in 2019, a Post analysis of city records found.
For at least the fifth straight year, Brooklyn — where Adams previously served as borough president — was home to more rodent complaints than any other NYC borough with 15,769, up 5% from 15,032 in 2022.
East Harlem had more rodent complaints than any neighborhood in the the Big Apple, with 1,517 calls — even after Adams in April designated it part of one of four so-called “rat mitigation zones” that receive additional rat prevention training workshops as well as beefed up enforcement against properties that fail inspections.
He even hired Kathleen Corradi at $155,000 yearly as the city’s first “rat czar” in April.
Since he beefed up “war” efforts, East Harlem had 1,298 rodent complaints from May through the end of 2023, a 76% increase from 736 the same period a year earlier.
The Harlem-wide mitigation zone saw a 1.6% uptick in complaints, to 3,267.
Harlem resident Ruth McDaniels, 59, said the rats are clearly winning, ripping the war as “a hoax.”
“This place is filthy; it’s so depressing,” she said of her block, adding she sees at least five rats scurrying around around the nabe every day — and they are “bigger than ever.”
The three other rat mitigation zones did see improvement, including one in Bedford-Stuyvesant where Adams owns a townhouse that has been slapped with numerous summonses for rodent infestation — despite his repeated efforts to clean up the mess.
That zone — which also includes Bushwick and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn — saw complaints fall by nearly 1%.
Another covering Grand Concourse in the Bronx saw a 1.4% drop, and a zone covering Chinatown, the East Village and Lower East Side saw the biggest decrease in complaints — nearly 15%.
Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who has repeatedly feuded with Adams over how to handle the city’s rat population, wasn’t impressed, saying more needed to be done than simply changing curbside trash hours from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
“He said he’s fighting a war on rats, but he never wants to go the whole nine yards — so far it’s all been smoke and mirrors,” said Sliwa, a former mayoral candidate.
Too many trash bins have been visibly overflowing citywide in recent weeks because the migrant crisis is draining Sanitation Department pickup services — so he only expects “more rats to feast in public,” Sliwa added.
Ernie Schicchi, a Brooklyn-based pest exterminator, said he has not been impressed with the city’s battle plan or its “General” Corradi.
“What this rat czar … has implemented isn’t doing anything at all,” he said, adding the city is “going after the obvious and whatever’s in the public eye.”
“Putting out garbage at a different time does basically zero,” the rat slayer noted.
“We’re not doing anything for rats that are underground. We’re not doing anything for rats that are in structures all throughout the city.”
“Mayor Adams declared war on rats when he took office, and under this administration, New York City is winning that war day by day,” a City Hall spokesperson said, adding that the more narrow complaint of rat sightings was down 7% citywide since May and 20% for 2023 in rat mitigation zones.
“The Adams administration will continue this fight until we can definitively declare victory.”
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