The rats you may have seen around the city could have something to do with recent construction.
Christina Kolb was in a rush. She had an appointment to get to. It was one of the coldest mornings of the winter. But her Honda CRV wouldn’t start. She heard clicking, but no engine turnover.
Could it be the weather? Probably not, since she was parked in the garage below her East Side apartment complex on Stowell Avenue. Flummoxed, she called a tow truck. It didn’t take long for the tow guy to find the culprit: Rats. A rat, or a mischief of them, got into the battery box and chewed through electrical wires, robbing her of an on-time arrival and a bit of the shine on her adopted city. “I always called Milwaukee the Magic City,” she says, “because even the alleys feel so clean compared to the alleys in Chicago.”
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Milwaukee city crews responded to 1,160 rat calls in 2023, up a bit from 1,110 in 2022. The uptick comes amid years of anecdotes proclaiming Milwaukee’s rat problem as the worst it’s ever been. Kolb’s situation describes why the city at least seems rattier.
The furballs with the Ginsu teeth and street smarts started becoming much more visible in her East Side neighborhood in fall 2023. They tend to appear en masse when big construction projects happen because the projects uproot them from their underground homes. In Kolb’s case, the city dug up nearby streets to lay new sewer lines.
“As Milwaukee started growing so much in the last, you know, three, four, five years, we definitely see more displaced rodents in the city,” says Jason Freel, region director for Terminix, a pest-control company. “That’s 100% accurate.”
There are sightings such as Kolb’s (or in Shorewood or Tosa), and rat infestations temporarily shut down the kitchen at North Division High School. Press reports focused on out-of-control rat problems at a few central-city apartment complexes, too.
Still, Milwaukee’s rat problem has to be taken in context, and any talk of rats inevitably includes Chicago. Kolb moved here from there, and is accurate in her assessment that Chicago dominates Milwaukee in this dubious regard. Chicago has been the No. 1 rattiest city in the country for years. Milwaukee tends to slot in the low to mid-20s, according to rankings by Orkin.
“Milwaukee is generally one of the cleaner cities that I’ve worked in,” says Freel, whose job as a rodentologist takes him to Detroit, New York City, Chicago and other cities with peskier problems. “Sanitation and garbage disposal and those type of things are a big factor in keeping a rat population down in a major metropolitan city.”
The problem with rats is they’re very hard to control once they gain entry. The best thing is to make your home, garage and car inhospitable. Seal up any cracks in the foundation or walls. Keep garbage bagged up in tightly closed bins. Don’t have standing water, such as a dog bowl, outside. Keep bird feeders above ground, out of reach.
Starving rats of easily accessible food, water and shelter works better than laying traps or poison boxes, which can harm kids and pets. Still, they’re pests with great survival instincts. “Even for us skilled professionals, it can be incredibly hard to catch even one leftover rat [who’s survived when others in its circle succumbed to traps],” says Freel. “They’re just that smart.”