Tom Tran
Rodent Violations in New York City Restaurant Inspections by Zip Code (2019)
Leveraging the dataset published by the city of New York, we can visualize the health violations with evidence of rats or mice present in the restaurant by zip code. 2019 was the most recent year with a full year record due to the pandemic in 2020.
Manhattan is definitely where the most of these instances are. Zooming into this area, 10003 and 10002 stand out as the most significant with 141 incidents in the former.
This combined area stretches from Union Square to Chinatown and Lower East Side. This may suggest that the problem is localized to Manhattan. That is true to some extent, but to me, this seems more widespread looking at the scatter plot below showing all the incidents.
If we look at the proportions of inspections that failed due to rodent presence, it seems to confirm that rodent is prevalent in Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx as well.
Lastly, here is a density map of rodent in NYC.
