WASHINGTON — Nowhere in D.C. has more rats than Columbia Heights – or, at least, nobody makes as many calls about them.
With a little less than two weeks left in the year, the Columbia Heights-Mt. Pleasant-Park View area has had at least 881 rodent inspection and treatment service requests, according to a WUSA9 analysis of 311 data.
That makes Columbia Heights the king of the hill – the “hill,” in this case, being a veritable mountain of rat-related calls to the city: more than 6,400 so far in 2019. That’s a citywide increase of almost 13% since 2018 and more than 80% since 2016.
So does that mean there are actually more rats? Maybe.
This summer, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser promised to “double down” on the city’s $1 million rat abatement program from 2018. Those efforts included coordinated blitzes in targeted areas to treat for rats and nearly $300,000 in commercial trash compactor grants.
But, as others have pointed out – among them Gizmodo’s Emily Lipstein – using 311 data shows you where people are *calling* about rats. Who decides to call, and who thinks their call will be heard, can have a lot to do with socioeconomics.
So we plotted out all 353,703 calls to 311 this year in order to compare them to population numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau.
What we found was, of the 20 Census tracts with the most calls to 311 per 1,000 residents, 18 were west of the Anacostia, with concentrations between Georgia Avenue and 5th Street and in the Bloomingdale-Shaw area. Only one of the 20 Census tracts with the highest rate of rat-related calls was east of the Anacostia.
As it happens, those areas also happen to be the ones with the highest levels of economic displacement in D.C., according to a study by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School.
Our rat map, then? It might actually just be a map of gentrification; or, at least, of the neighborhoods where people know how to get a hold of 311.
If you’d like to talk to 311 about rats, you can find more information here, or call 877-672-2174.
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Jordan Fischer is the data reporter for WUSA9. Follow him on Twitter at @JordanOnRecord.
