Aaron Schmitt loved the small brown house he rented off an alley in Austin’s East Cesar Chavez neighborhood. His landlord had converted the garage into a one-bedroom apartment, and while the space was old it allowed him to live within walking distance of restaurants, bars and food trucks.
But in 2016, a couple years after Schmitt moved in, he realized he wasn’t alone. Rats, it turned out, had joined him. A pack of rats. Scurrying through his walls. The sounds of their living interrupted his.
“The cheeping … and the scrabbling that you hear in the background is kind of terrifying,” he said. “You're in your home in the dark at night, and there are rats somewhere in your walls. You're wondering where they are and what they're going to do.”
Would the rats carve a way through the walls and into his living room? Would they find him in his sleep? What had he done to bring them inside?
“Did I leave the garbage out too long? Have I lured them in by not doing something right?” Schmitt wondered. Eventually, an exterminator came and patched several holes on the outside of the house, closing off entryways the rats had been using. To Schmitt’s knowledge, they never returned.
But it got him wondering: “Why is there such a rat problem in Austin?”
Schmitt’s question presumes that Austin has a rat problem. Does Austin have a rat problem? The answer is hard to get at – or, scratch at. If we start with the list of “rattiest cities” released annually by Orkin, a pest control company that operates throughout the country, Austin doesn’t even make the top 50. Chicago, New York, Seattle and Baltimore all out-rat the Texas capital.
But these annual rankings rely on the number of calls to Orkin, one pest control company, and so hardly capture the entirety of Austin’s rodent problem. Next, we can look to municipal complaint data. How often did someone call the City of Austin to complain about a rodent infestation? Last year, 457 times. In 2022, there were 474 complaints about rodents.
But the city doesn't track just rat complaints. Instead, it categorizes these complaints as ones about rodents, so a caller could have issues with squirrels, mice or, perhaps, hamsters. Determining the extent of Austin’s “rat problem” is hard, if not impossible.
“Everyone always asks, ‘How many rats in New York City? How many rats in Chicago?’” said Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist. That’s right. He studies rats in cities. Especially New York City, known for its rat population. “Nobody knows those answers. There’s no way to get at it, scientifically.”
It may be hard to quantify rats or the problems they create in Austin, but if we didn’t have a problem with rats infesting homes and offices, sometimes the offices of state agencies, then Manuel Ortiz might not have a job. Ortiz oversees the residential pest department at ABC Home and Commercial Services.
“It takes a certain type of person to do this job,” Ortiz said. “You’re used to seeing animals on the side of the road. This [is] a little different.”
Both Ortiz and Corrigan explain that Austin, and many U.S. cities, have rat populations because rats are extremely adaptable creatures. They are willing to eat a long menu of things — insects, sticks, discarded fast food — and can squeeze through holes 1-inch wide. Rats learned centuries ago that humans are a great species to live near.
“Look at this,” Corrigan said, “these humans have moved into this cave or this simple building, but they leave food residues on the floor; they leave bones around. They try to store their food in here and they don't do it well.”
If rats need to access food, water or shelter, they can typically chew their way into a space to get it. Rats are rodents, which means their teeth are continuously growing. To keep their teeth from growing too long, rats chew constantly. And their teeth are incredibly strong. Rats can chew through wires, wood and in some cases, poorly sealed concrete.
“They’ll chew through vinyl siding, shingles,” Ortiz said. “Drywall is like butter.”
And once they come inside your house, they can be hard to get rid of. Rats communicate through pheromones released in their urine and feces and can tell other rats when they’ve found a safe space with water and food. That safe space might be your home, Corrigan said. They can make a mess of your home and your mind.
“Let’s just say tonight you’re relaxing,” he said. “You’re ready to have your regular bedtime but you hear something scrabbling about in the wall above the bedroom. … You’ve been invaded by something, a wild animal. If you can’t get rid of that wild animal, it will affect you. Studies have shown you’ll be stressed. You’ll be annoyed, you’ll be short-tempered. You’ll sometimes distance yourself from people.”
What Corrigan didn’t know when he described to me that hypothetical situation last year, is that I was living it. In 2022, I bought a condo in North Austin. The day I moved in I heard scurrying in my kitchen ceiling. I assumed it was a small terrier, a dog living with upstairs neighbors I had yet to meet. Turns out, no one was living above me. Well, rats were.
The property management company sent out an exterminator. He set traps and initially the traps caught, well killed, two rats under my kitchen sink. But I continued to hear their scuffling, chirping, rustling at all hours. I heard them most often in my kitchen ceiling. Sometimes while cooking dinner, I’d take a wooden spoon and whack, whack, whack at the wall above my head, shouting for them to leave me be.
Exterminators figured the rats were coming in from the outside. I live in a building built in the late 1960s, and there are gaps in the exterior wall. Maybe the rats were wiggling their way in through a gap. Workers used pieces of thin steel to patch holes they found on the sides of the building and the roof. But it did not help. The rats continued to live their lives alongside me.
After six months of setting traps that caught nothing, I was sitting on my couch when I heard a loud crunching noise near my bathroom. I called a friend who rushed over. A rat had started chewing its way through a drywall divider between my tub and the HVAC system. When my friend got to my house we didn’t know what to do. He and I ended up kicking at the wall where the rat was, yelling, “You are not welcome here!” After about an hour, the rat gave up and retreated back to where it came from, leaving a small, jagged hole in the drywall.
Eventually, the exterminator who had been coming to my house for months guessed the rats might be getting into my walls through a broken pipe. He was right. Plumbers found a 2-inch hole in the cast iron pipe behind my kitchen sink. When they opened the ceiling to access the pipe and replace it, pellets of rat poop and several dead rats poured from the ceiling. It was raining rats.
It’s been nearly a year since the broken pipe in my kitchen was replaced. I have heard no rats. In November, I had a housewarming party two years after moving in. It was, in part, to celebrate the rats being expelled from my home. I filled a punch bowl with a yellow-hued drink and called it “Rat Piss.” I hung paper cutouts of rats on the wall. Afraid of angering the rat gods with my friends and my partying, I erected an altar, adorning it with plastic rats from Amazon and a gothic cross I found at Goodwill. Friends brought cheese as sacrificial offerings.
But the altar, the plastic rats – none of this could adequately communicate to my friends what it was like to live with rats. The creepy-crawly feeling it gave me. The sense that I was never alone. So, I wrote a poem. A not-good poem. I recorded it and set it to the sounds of the rats from my home. On the night of the party, I put the rat poem on loop in my bathroom. Every time a friend peed, they shared in my horror. I was not alone. They were not alone. We are not alone.
