In this summer of stink, amid an endless heat wave and a 25% annual surge in trash complaints, New York City is turning to rats for help.
The human kind, that is.
The Sanitation Department is rolling out a new campaign urging New Yorkers to snitch on the filthiest residential and commercial property owners as well as tenants — and will throw the foulest offenders in a new, online “Hall of Shame.”
“Some sidewalk slobs have had it too good for too long, but now, their litter lovefest is over,” Commissioner Jessica Tisch told The Post.
The Hall of Shame “is where we’ll be calling out those worst of the worst – property owners who put the businesses and residences around them at risk by allowing filthy conditions to fester,” she said.
The goal is to first locate the scofflaws and then humiliate them into cleaning up their streets and sidewalks.
Trash pics can be sent through a newly created portal on the agency website.
Workers with the Enforcement and Cleaning Operations units will comb through the images and inspect the properties to determine which have broken the law, which requires building owners to clean their sidewalks and 18 inches into the street.
Offenders will be hit with fines up to $100 for residential properties and $500 for commercial. And the worst of the worst get inducted — showcasing their grimy photos and addresses.
“I’m all for it, especially the fine part,” cheered bouncer Randy Robinson, 34, as he stared down a mountain of cardboard boxes over on Broadway in the Garment District.
“When you hurt their pockets, and their pride, they’ll listen. [New Yorkers] don’t like embarrassment.”
The rat-out campaign comes as 311 complaints about filth have surged through July 7 this year compared to the same period in 2023, including:
- 19,222 reports about dirty sidewalks, from 15,339 reports last year
- 1,188 reports about dirty streets, from 1,019 last year
- 2,644 reports about obstructive trash or recycling, from 2,076 last year
- 1,463 reports about dog poop, from 1,439 last year
“When some neighbors ignore this duty [to keep the city clean], we must enforce our rules,” said Caryl Englander, chair of DSNY’s affiliated nonprofit Sanitation Foundation, which is promoting the new campaign.
“The sidewalk slobs program can help us create a cleaner, more beautiful city we can all be proud of.”
Some streets are routinely filthy — so much so that on East 27th Street, a murderer thought they could hide a corpse in a sleeping bag alongside piles of trash bags set out for pickup.
“It’s so bad now that you can hide a dead body in garbage bags,” said Kips Bay resident Joshua Guzman.
“I walked right past it. …They always [leave out] so much garbage right there and you never notice.”
But some are holding their noses over penalizing property owners with a deluge of fines and public mockery.
“The reason a business has gotten to that point is probably doing more damage than the shaming would,” said Alexandra Schmidbauer, lead organizer for the community group Flatbush Cleanup.
“There’s some other issue that needs to be addressed — money, man power…Is the business closed the time they need to bring out the trash?”
“Blanket penalties are not productive,” she continued.
Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance BID, cheered on the “Hall of Shame,” calling it a smart idea akin to strategies used by other city agencies and officials.
“There’s a history in the city of publicizing bad actors,” he said, citing the annual worst landlords list.
“Now they’re applying a practice that was effective in those areas to people that make our city a dirtier place.”
The “Hall of Shame” initiative is the latest effort by the Adams administration to help polish the Big Apple.
Small residential buildings will soon be required to dump their trash in container bins versus leaving unsightly bags out on the street, Mayor Adams announced this week, a move was recommended by the consulting firm McKinsey following its $1.6 million taxpayer-funded study on the viability of trash containerization in New York City.
The agency also pointed to additional investments under the Adams administration to clean up the five boroughs, including the launch of a targeted neighborhood task force and highway unit.