America’s 5 Most Rodent-Infested Cities: Is Your City on the List?

In cities, rodents like rats and mice can pose a serious threat to human health and cause considerable annoyance. These pests have the potential to contaminate food, spread illness, and harm property.

Prominent pest control businesses Terminix and Orkin release an annual list of the cities where their services were most utilized, both for residential and commercial purposes.

We included their results into a list of the top five American cities with the highest rodent infestations, so if you don’t want to travel through these areas, you may want to take these rankings into consideration.

This post will discuss the top five American cities with the highest documented rodent infestation rates and provide you tips on how to keep your house and neighborhood free of these unwelcome intruders.

Chicago, Illinois

Not only is Chicago a sizable metropolis with one of the greatest Chinatowns in the country, but it also has the best airport network in the country.

It is constantly positioned at the top of Orkin’s rankings, even though it only placed sixth on Terminix’s 2023 list of cities plagued by rodents. This could mean that Orkin is just more popular in Chicago.

There’s no disputing that Chicago is battling with their rat problem. In 2022, the city had over 50,000 rat reports. Even though it was lower than in prior years, it was still far higher than the norm prior to COVID-19.

San Francisco, California

Since at least 2012, the number of rodents causing issues in the city has been rising. The nation’s largest tourist trap, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, is a rat’s heaven with an abundance of food and people, making it a comfortable haven for other rodents as well.

However, Chinatown appears to be the rat population’s busiest place.

Rats are more common in Chinatown than other districts, which makes sense given the area’s crowded population and combination of outdated infrastructure, including sealant and pipes.

San Francisco has a different approach to eliminating rats than the majority of other cities. Contraceptives are being used in the city instead. A small amount of this combination can render rats sterile for several months.

It occupies the same amount of space as a typical rat poison trap, but it poses less of a threat to creatures higher up in the food chain and leaves significantly fewer carcasses for the city to dispose of.

Washington D.C.

It’s one of the roughest areas in the nation to obtain parking because the city is so crowded. The two most prevalent rodent species in and around homes and on the streets of Washington, D.C., are house mice and brown rats.

The manager of D.C. Health’s Rodent and Vector Control Program, Gerard Brown, told WUSA9 that over 11,300 complaints regarding rat sightings were received by the patrol in 2021.That year, the number increased quite a bit; in 2020, there were only roughly 7,500 complaints.

Residents in the neighborhood want to take precautions against mice and rats that may be looking for a new home or food source because rodents are so prevalent in this area.

Los Angeles, California

In a 2023 interview with USC Annenberg Media, Alexis Mesa, a student at the University of Southern California, discussed the rubbish, saying, “I feel like around here on campus I don’t see a lot [of rats] but I understand why. I feel like in a lot of low-income communities around, trash pickup is rare. Generally in downtown L.A. I don’t think waste management is that good.”

Andrew Pena, another USC student, added that there’s more than just trash present, stating, “I’ve never seen them clean the streets at all.”

As food in homes became the easiest meal and the amount of trash from restaurants and businesses dropped, it forced the already enormous population of rats out of the streets and into residential areas.

Los Angeles consistently ranks among the top three rat-infested cities according to Orkin, and its rat problem is becoming worse every year.

That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. There are gorgeous vistas of paradise in Los Osos and Baywood Park, but the crowds and pests are significantly less bothersome if you’re looking for a place with the splendor of Los Angeles but not nearly as many rats.

New York City, New York

An estimated 3 million rats live in the city, which is about one-third of the 8.3 million people that live there. The city is making every effort to combat the rats, which includes improving the waste management systems.

Rat complaints dropped by as much as 66% in the year after the trash cans were installed in September 2023, according to the city’s sanitation department (via NPR). Following San Francisco’s lead, the city approved a plan in 2024 to use contraceptives on rats.

New York is a lovely place to live in or visit, even with the rats.

By: islands.com