New York City Maps Rat Population

NEW YORK— Michael Mills, a veteran health inspector in New York City, helps create a map of the city you won't find in any guidebook: a rat map. That's right, a map of the New York neighborhoods that rodent populations call home.

The city's rat map was first introduced a year ago, with an intensive pilot program in the Bronx. Mills and other inspectors scoured the streets, building by building, cataloging rat hotspots — places that show so-called active rat signs, such as lived-in burrows, fresh droppings, tell-tale gnaw marks on plastic garbage bags — in an effort to target rodent-control measures more effectively. That geocoding information was entered into each inspector's hand-held indexing computer and aggregated with similar data from all across the borough.

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Source: Time