Introduction

This paper draws correlations between New York City’s rat populations and rodent inspections with its census tracts across the city, to see which borough has the open, resolved and pending 311 requests.

Questions: 1. What is the rat population reported in each borough? Which boroughs have the most/least number of rats? 2. Where are the hotspots for rat populations? Distribution by businesses (restaurants, grocery stores, malls etc), by public transport (more at certain subway stops than others), low-income areas vs high-income areas and so on. 3. Which neighbourhoods see the maximum number of 311 calls for rat sightings? Which areas saw the quickest “complaint solved” timings/what does it mean? Does this change across boroughs? 4. How is the rental real estate market related by this rat sighting data? Do the areas that have higher median rent (i.e. expensive areas like downtown Manhattan) also see lower rat sightings, owing to quicker service by NYC health department? 5. Can a conclusion be drawn that connects rat population to affluency of area (based on median rent), showing underserviced boroughs (that would possibly align with low-income areas as well)?

Data Sources

Sources for all datasets: Rat Sightings: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/Rat-Sightings/3q43-55fe/about_data

Rodent Inspections: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/Rodent-Inspection/p937-wjvj/about_data

American Community Survey data: get_acs function

Loading libraries:

Reading in ACS data:

Further processing ACS data to make county-wise datasets:

MANHATTAN BOROUGH - NEW YORK COUNTY

BROOKLYN BOROUGH - KINGS COUNTY

QUEENS - COUNTY

BRONX COUNTY

STATEN ISLAND - RICHMOND COUNTY

Reading in rodent inspection dataset:

Discussion

As evident by the maps, the highest concentration of rat sightings are in New Yok County and Kings County. Moreover, in all counties, rat sightings are more concentrated in census tracts that are more densely packed. Removing the closed cases, it is also evident that rat sightings categorized as “pending” or “in progress” are mostly concentrated in Brooklyn. For this reason, I chose to focus on Brooklyn for the second part of this analysis, which involved looking at rodent inspections in the borough. I chose to create maps depicting the “results” listed against each inspection case. While there is a strong significance of inspections that are listed as passed, there is still a higher concentration of cases where there is continued rat activity, or where inspections have failed for “other reasons”. These inspections are also largely concentrated in East New York, which has a largely BIPOC population, this is an aspect of this research I plan to explore further, along with learning how to process litter basket inventory to see if there is a correlation between type of baskets with rat sightings. I also explored the concentration of rat activity against the concentration of Pre-WWII buildings, however, as evident in the map, there is no strong correlation.

Results

Based on my initial questions, this research exercise explored the populations and hot spots of rat sightings in each borough, revealing that the highest concentration of active rat sightings is in Brooklyn. Additionally, it showed that Richmond has the fewest rat sightings. The research also explored rodent inspections in Kings County, which are concentrated in East New York, and significantly result in continued rat activity and remaining unsolved. The maps also indicate a strong correlation between rat sightings and population density in census tracts, while showing no strong correlation between rat activity and the concentration of pre-war buildings in Brooklyn.

Next Steps

This research can be expanded on by looking at several other factors including:s

Looking at the concentration of rat sightings and rodent inspections against other socioeconomic factors such as Median Household Income and percent BIPOC populations.

Looking at the count of sightings in each census tract and making choropleth maps to show their concentrations in each county.

Exploring the relationship between rat sightings and the presence of litter baskets across census tracts.

For future use, it would also be helpful to make the maps interactive in order to see the two layers of data more clearly in relation to each other.