THE RATS ARE WINNING
Despite Blaz ‘war,’ NYCHA projects in Brooklyn & Manhattan are overrun
Just below the first-floor windows at the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, a series of baseballsized holes indicate the presence of a substantial non-human population lurking just below the surface.
These holes were put there by rats. Lots and lots of rats.
These are rat burrows, tunnels that exist throughout this huge development where the tenants say the fourlegged vermin come and go as they please, whenever they get a twitchy little urge to roam.
“They don’t care if it’s day or night,” said Lolita Yurnet, 54, who won’t let her visiting grandchildren go outside or walk her dog after dark “because the rats are all over.”
“They’re getting bigger and bigger,” she says. “They’re in apartments.”
Marcy, opened in 1949, is a sprawling 28-acre development of 27 six-story buildings in Bed-Stuy that houses 4,382 tenants and counts Jay Z among its former residents. For years, it has been plagued by an overabundance of rodents.
Last spring it was one of 10 spots named by Mayor de Blasio as the “most infested” public housing developments in the city when he announced an aggressive campaign to exterminate the furry pests at a press conference that featured a sign, “Watch Out Rats!”
That was six months ago. Today, people at Marcy and several other developments on the mayor’s “most infested” list say it’s actually gotten worse.
And it’s not limited to the 10 tagged as “most infested.” That list expanded last week after rats overran NYCHA’s Claremont Rehab apartments in the Bronx, with video emerging of rats – well-fed rats – crawling over a washing machine and all over a kitchen sink.
That alarming visual prompted NYCHA to release a new list of “most infested” that now includes Claremont and five more sites in the Bronx.
The problem is not new. In June federal prosecutors noted NYCHA’s inability to address its rat dilemma in the 80-page complaint filed when the authority agreed to the appointment of a monitor. The feds alleged that NYCHA has for years failed to adequately embrace a protocol of consistently stopping up burrows and keeping developments clean of garbage to cut off food supplies.
They cited an April 2015 email in which a city health inspector found new kitchen cabinets installed without first plugging up gaps in the wall. The cabinets, the inspector wrote, “quickly became a beautiful rat condo.”
A key problem has been the dirt basements that exist in some older developments that offer an ideal environment for rat burrows.
In 2016, NYCHA poured concrete over a dirt basement at the Patterson Houses in the Bronx after the Daily News ran photos of a labyrinth of subterranian tunnels there. After the mayor’s “Watch Out Rats!” campaign last April, the mayor promised more concrete was on its way.
As of this week, however, NYCHA has finished paving over all of the dirt basements at Marcy and some at the Riis Houses on the Lower East Side. All told, they have 50 more concrete slabs planned for eight developments on their to-do list, including the Vladeck, Smith, Wald and LaGuardia buildings in Manhattan and the Jackson, But-
ler, E. 180th St. and the Highbridge Gardens in the Bronx.
“While rats are an issue that plague all New Yorkers, the mayor’s commitment through the Neighborhood Rat Reduction program is helping us finally get ahead of rodent issues at our most affected sites,” said Jasmine Blake, NYCHA spokeswoman. “As we move forward with more substantial capital improvements, we expect to see the rat population at NYCHA decrease even further, improving the quality of life for our residents.”
Several proposed “rat reduction” contracts are awaiting approval from the city controller, and NYCHA has begun dropping dry ice into burrows, adding exterminators and installing new interior and exterior compactors to prevent the spread of garbage in common areas and courtyards.
But at Marcy on Friday, NYCHA had locked a compactor for repairs, so residents were forced to drop bags of trash into a courtyard near a playground next to a sign warning “Do Not Leave Garbage Here.”
Marcy tenant Lenore, 43, who only wanted to divulge her first name, stood in her kitchen holding up a sticky rat trap the size of a bathmat that NYCHA gave her after rats invaded her apartment on Oct. 12. She lives on the first floor with her three children, ages 5, 12 and 21. The rat burrow holes are right outside her windows.
“When I went into clean my bedroom, one of them came flying out. It ran into the kitchen,” she said. “I put the (traps) on the floor in the kitchen. When I woke up one was on the trap over here. Another was on a trap over there.”
Months ago she said a relative dumped ammonia into a rat hole just below her window. Multiple rats emerged and scampered away. Usually when they leave their underground lair, she said, they saunter about as if they own the place.
“They don’t even run,” she said. “They just sit there. It’s crazy. They’re not afraid of people.”
In fact, a visit last week to most of the 10 “most infested” sites made clear the targets of the war on rats have survived and even thrived.
At the Bushwick Houses in Brooklyn, a reporter spotted a rat lounging by a dumpster at mid-day. A tenant named Sylvia, who asked that only her first name be used, said she sees rats all the time — and not just near the dumpster.
“You see them all around here, in the front of buildings, in the entrances,” she said. “I’ve seen up to five of them screwing around. They’re really nasty. I know the lady who lives on the first floor of my building, she’s afraid that the rats might get inside her apartment.”
In the Bronx at the Webster and Morrisania Houses — two more on the “most infested” list — a tenant named Louis, 52, resorts to dark humor to deal with the rancid rodents.
“I see rats standing right there, holding the door for people to come in. That’s how bold they are,” he said. “They’re really big. Every night, every night, every night there’s rats here. Oh my God, it’s disgusting.”
Another Webster tenant who didn’t want his name used called the vermin populace there “serious. They come through the walls. Sunday night I saw one. It was on the second floor, in the hallway. They’ll be trying to get from floor to floor. They crawl up the walls.”