San Francisco named 4th 'rattiest' city in America, according to 2024 report
Managing the rat population has been a challenge for the city
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Basketball legend Charles Barkley has taken a lot of flack for calling San Francisco a "ratty city." But according to a recent survey done by Orkin pest control services, Barkley isn't entirely wrong. San Francisco was named the fourth rattiest city in America. Chicago received the top stop followed by Los Angeles and New York.
San Francisco has had a rat problem for years. How big?
Trying to count the number of rats is not really feasible. Orkin, the pest control company based in Atlanta, took its data from local customers.
"The call centers received calls from individual people seeking assistance for rodent issues and those are tabulated in Atlanta," explained Paul Biggs of Orkin. "There's an abundance of rodents this year."
But let's take a more scientific approach. The University of Richmond gathered rat stats from some big cities in America and from three international ones.
Jonathan Richardson led the research and found that the rat population has expanded around the world.
MORE: A look at Bay Area's rise in rats as CA cracks down on poisons harmful to wildlife
"The things that those rat numbers tied to are warming climates, so cities that have been warming faster than others, also have faster increases in their rat numbers and cities that have more people also have faster increase in their rats numbers," said Dr. Richardson.
More people often means more waste and having warming climates can expand the life expectancy of a rat -- therefore more time to mate.
"They can spend more time feeding and maybe squeeze out another reproductive cycle or two which would accelerate population growth," said Richardson.
"The mating season is getting longer because of the weather," assured Niv Goldman who owns Alley Cat, a rodent exclusion company.
"A rodent female can bring in hundreds of little 'youngins' every year," he clarified.
Dr. Richardson's study found that over a span of 12 years, San Francisco had a "significant increasing trend" in rat numbers.
VIDEO: Rodent infestation plagues yards of Pleasanton residents pleading for city to intervene
Zak Goetschi with the Department of Recreation and Parks has a job worthy of acknowledgment. He's trying to control the rat population at Portsmouth Square in Chinatown with pellets.
"It's normally gone in two weeks. So this is a rodent birth control so it should sterilize the rats after they consume it," detailed Goetschi.
The bait is meant to disrupt sperm production in males and affects a female's ovaries making it hard to conceive. San Francisco has been doing this at a few parks since 2019.
They have also set traps and used some kind of poison. All those methods helped reduce the the number of borrows specifically at Portsmouth Square from 270 to 48, but in the past year that number has crept up.
"There is no magic, one perfect magic bullet to get rid of rats. It is doing a lot of things together, it's trapping, it is waste management, making sure garbage is secure, it's cutting back foliage so they don't have a place to nest," insisted Tamara Barak Aparton of Rec. and Park.
Managing rat populations is more challenging that ever.
In 2020, California became the first state to stop using some toxic rat poisons that were unintentionally harming and killing wildlife.
MORE: Is rat birth control a fix for NYC's rodent woes?
And in Jan. 2025 another bill, AB 2552 went into effect banning even more poisons.
Dr. Richardson says that's the humane thing to do, but sees a downside to the law.
"There's also some drawbacks in terms of removing some of the tools that may be available for cities or for private pest management operators to be able to use in certain situations," he said.
"Rodents are very agile, they can go underground and the can hide, the solution is control," added Goldman.
Most everyone agrees, the long-term strategy to keeping the population down is reducing a rat's access to food waste - put there by humans.
