Not far from Broadway Avenue, Wiley Hardy steps from a no-frills
city sedan with a broomstick and a white bucket of poison. He’s dressed
in dungarees. His partner, fellow health inspector Mike Debs, is in
business casual and carries a clipboard and a stack of bright-orange
door hangers. Good cop and bad cop, for rats. The duo heads up Dolloff
Road, door-to-door, hole-to-hole, for yet another afternoon of
embarrassing and occasionally wretch-inducing confrontations.
The first house makes them beam patriotically. “See how the cans are
all up and covered?” notes Hardy. “They’ve even got the recycling cans.
The grass is cut. Weeds: pulled. Nice. Why’s a rat gonna want up in
there?”
Especially when the next house is so close.
It’s a foreclosure, paint peeled and windows boarded up, except for
a few where the wood’s been pried away and glass daggers are showing.
The grass is cut, though. Hardy says they’re not going to find that
many rat holes there, anyway — not enough food and water
immediately at hand. Or maybe there is.
Next door again, the smell of cat pee stops Hardy in his tracks. He
knows that people and their garbage can’t be far. The house after that
has lush flowerbeds at the head of a cluttered driveway leading to a
garage that belches debris, the door resting half-open onto several
comically overflowing garbage cans. Hardy pokes around with his stick
at some old cat food and a Cheetos bag through the slats on the front
stoop as Debs knocks. No answer. He tags the door. Do this, that and
everything else that stinks of urine in 30 days, it reads, or pay $75
and live to not give a shit another day.
“See?” says Hardy, pointing his stick at the garage. “Rats would
stay there because they’re hiding, and they got food and nobody’s
looking back there. Obviously.”
He asks Debs how many babies to a mother. “There can be 20,” says
Debs. Hardy adds, “And every two months or so.”
Ugh. Every so often, they get to clean up after a hoarder who’s
turned his house into an enclosed landfill, where rats hunt roaches in
a miniature circle of life. Or they’ll help an old person haul crap to
the curb, after baiting holes that were hissing back. One old woman’s
house had rats still living in the trees and windowsills, dead all
through the driveway and basement. And the glory of all rat anecdotes:
A few times a year, the city fields calls from citizens in a fit about
a most inopportune visit.
“They’re real good swimmers,” says Hardy. “So they just swim up from
where they’re at in the sewer and then just climb right up into the
toilet.”
Back in the trunk, they’ve got bait that comes in a big block and
lasts for years that they hang from the sewer grates. Some of the rats
eat the poison and bleed to death inside. Most don’t touch the stuff.
And since they don’t usually come out until dark, Debs doesn’t always
know for sure if they’re even in the hole he’s baiting. But other
times, like last year, Debs found 60 holes in and around Public Square,
and the poison was a success. (It probably didn’t hurt that cops booted
all the homeless too, and the parks department plucked all the bushes
that pedestrians used as trash cans.)
Rats thrive among homo slobbians.
Debs turns another corner, and this time, the smell that stops him
is more exotic: stale beer, dirty diapers and a little rotten meat for
texture. “Here we go right here,” he says, thwacking his stick against
the ground hard as he heads up a gravel driveway strewn with refuse. An
algae-slicked kiddie pool waits for mosquito eggs beside an old pickup
piled like Sanford and Sons’ — with even more garbage and
seemingly useless debris. Debs knocks. Hardy thinks he sees a rat
scurry from one of several wide cracks in the foundation. Then a
middle-aged woman is at the door with a big dog barking from somewhere
behind her.
“Put the dog away, ma’am,” Hardy tells her as he inches from the
property. He doesn’t like hearing that anymore. The woman complies,
tells a little girl to “Get in the house!” and begins her spiel about
how the rats are everyone else’s fault.
“It looks like they’re living here, under the porch,” says Debs
matter-of-factly. “What about all your garbage here?” adds Hardy.
“Tomorrow’s garbage day,” she says.
“Not today, though, right?” says Debs, too quietly for her to hear.
They give her 30 days and a compliment on how nice her tomato plants
are looking.
Nobody ever wants to claim the rat, says Hardy. “It’s the landlord
not doing something, or it’s the neighbors problem. It’s never
them.”
In five houses, they’re at the end of the block. Every other lot is
empty. They cross the road and head back toward the car, expecting a
lot more of the same until quitting time comes.
About a month ago, a rat as big as Andre the Giant’s shoe lay dead
in the street by the Detroit-Superior Bridge. One of several disgusted
passersby, a 20-ish woman with a lapdog on a leash, stopped to say,
“Jesus, right?” “Not quite,” I said, shooting a picture, with my
lighter added for perspective.
It wasn’t the first. There were three in the ditch down by the Rapid
station. These reportedly were not the first sightings either, and
every one appears to be more sensational than the last! Stay tuned for
updates.
“Some of them are eating pretty good, definitely,” says Larry
Jewett, the supervisor of the local inspection program, who started out
a few decades ago on a six-man Rat Patrol with Debs. He now dispatches
three two-man nuisance teams to different problem spots all over the
city every workday. Whether they’re aborting mosquito larvae or
surveying the city’s worst neighborhoods, they’re the outmatched but
stalwart frontline soldiers in Mayor Frank Jackson’s Clean Cleveland
initiative to beautify the city by making all of the city’s departments
actually work together as a team.
Matt Carroll, Jackson’s director of public health, acknowledges a
spike in nuisance complaints — including rats — that
coincided with the rise in foreclosures. (Newspapers from other wracked
regions like Phoenix, Baltimore and North Jersey all say the same.) But
Carroll points to evidence of a breakthrough: Though the number of
nuisances has pretty much held steady — about 17,000 in ’08, of
which rat calls were a small percentage — maps showing the number
of rat baitings over the past two years indicate a dramatic
improvement. Or rats on the run.
“The city is systematically and consistently ‘swept’ with these
departments working together,” writes Carroll in an e-mail. “There are
more eyes on these issues than there were before.” Survey teams are
more visible. Parks department crews are managing to mow more vacant
plots than ever, despite steep cutbacks. “And less high grass and trash
= less rodents,” notes Carroll.
But nobody’s under any illusions. On a visit to Dolloff Road, Jewett
says, “Rats aren’t the biggest problem with poverty — they’re
just living off of it.”
“But before, we didn’t hit the streets like we do now,” adds Debs.
“We went on complaints. It took an effort from the mayor to say, ‘I
want people out there every day.'”
All three agree. But Hardy, who lives in this Broadway neighborhood,
mentions how one person’s solution can sometimes be another person’s
poison. They still get between two and a dozen calls a day from people
with rats all over the place.
“We can’t eliminate this,” says Hardy. “We just have to do our best
to stay on top of them, in front of them. Some people, they be mad. The
value of their property is going down. There’s a [block] on East 54th
— there used to be 25 houses. Now there’s six. That’s on one of
the blocks. It’s a whole chain. They’ve lost like 80 houses on that
street. Demo crews are always over there. And so when they tear those
houses down, the rats go running. You get rid of one problem and
another one comes up.”
That’s how Sarah Jackson feels about the city she’s lived in for all
her 80 years. Try telling her that things are getting better. A few
weeks ago, she called the city to her East 123rd Street home when she
started hearing scurrying at night and noticing droppings in the
garage. It took three calls and a whole bunch of railing before a team
came out and baited the holes.
“I really have seen a big increase,” she says about the rats. “A lot
of homes around here are empty. But they put down poison, so I don’t
see that many now. I’m not saying they’re not out there, but … You
gotta raise your voice.”
A few weeks before that, over on Lamontier Avenue, 56-year-old
Yvonne Jackson (no relation) called the city when she started seeing a
succession of fat rats coming from the vacant house next door to feast
on her garbage and dig at cracks around her foundation. Her son-in-law
saw a rat “as big as his foot” out in the garage. Like many others,
she’s thought hard about leaving Cleveland for good, after spending 35
years here watching her neighborhood slowly ravaged, “but I can’t just
leave like that.”
“They came out and put bait around my home and around the garage,
but it doesn’t do any good when there’s a vacant house next door and
across the street,” she says.
Jackson lobbied for two years to have the long-vacant drug den
across the street razed. The inhabitants torched the place a year back,
and not until last month did the city get the clearance and the money
to tear down the charred husk. When they did, Jackson saw another spike
in the free-roving rat population. She turned her sights on the house
next door. She hopes that, pretty soon, it won’t just be her and the
rats.
Barbara Diggs, 60, remembers a Cleveland where citizens of even the
most unsavory of neighborhoods would get badgered for little things
like littering and loitering. “Now, people are just throwing garbage
out on the streets,” she says. “That’s how the rats eat.”
And don’t even get her started on all the foreclosures that are
starting to creep up her street from down at the other end. But her
biggest worry is her hygiene-challenged next-door neighbor. Diggs
called the city a few months back to complain about all the rats she
alleged were coming over from the neighbors’ backyard. Two big barking
dogs are kept over there in pens, while the rats eat all their food and
feces (yes, rats eat dog feces). She tried telling them to clean up in
as nice a voice as possible, but when she didn’t feel heard, she had to
call in reinforcements.
“The woman from the city came out to have them clean up, because of
the waste and everything, and she must have sent them a letter, because
the other day, both of them were out there cleaning up.”
She wonders how long before that house is empty.
“I don’t understand,” she says. “If these houses they’ve known that
they’re foreclosed, but they’re all tore up and raggedy, why don’t they
just get rid of them all?”
They’re on it. At about $10,000 per demolition, and an estimated
15,000 across the city just waiting in line, a lot of time and money
will be spent to rearrange all the holes. And no one knows how many
rats will scurry from one abandoned structure to another in the
meantime.
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2009.