Overflowing Dumpsters Create Rat Nightmare In Logan Square. Could Weekend Ticketing Help?

LOGAN SQUARE — For months, Eli Albert has been on a crusade to stop a rat infestation in his alley and get city workers to ticket building owners whose dumpsters overflow on weekends.

The quest has been in vain thus far — so, he’s trying a new approach.

The Logan Square resident recently launched a website and campaign called Ticket On Sundays to put pressure on city crews to ticket more owners of overflowing dumpsters with residents’ help. Albert’s campaign also urges city workers to count neighbor photos of overflowing garbage as evidence to ticket the owners in lieu of personally observing them.

He’s asking Chicagoans citywide to sign his petition to ask the city to enforce its own garbage rules, he said.

“It just seems like the overflowing dumpsters are the source of the infestations,” Albert said. “There’s always going to be rats in Chicago, but this is the infestation problem — we’re just giving them this buffet all the time, every weekend, and that’s enough to feed them over the week.”

For months, Albert submitted 311 requests regarding rats and overflowing dumpster violations for his neighboring building, hoping city workers would come out on weekends and ticket the building, he said. After speaking with city inspectors and workers on the job, they told him they don’t work weekends.

“The inspector was just like, ‘We’re not going to come out on the weekend. We just don’t do that,’” Albert said.

But they could, he said.

City data shows Streets and Sanitation crews have issued a majority of sanitary code violations on weekdays compared to weekends.

A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Streets and Sanitation, which oversees the complaints and rodent abatement program, said crews are out daily.

“Crews are out seven days a week, and when we encounter an issue or potential violation, we address it right away,” said Ryan Gage, department spokesperson. “We encourage residents to report rodent activity and other sanitation complaints to 311.”

Rats In The Kitchen

The issue has become personal for Albert. In May, he found two rats in his kitchen, which he said kicked off his crusade. He believes they entered from the alley, where they dug holes into the walls of his home and climbed up into his second-floor kitchen.

“I was on a meeting with one of my product managers and then I just looked down, and there’s a couple rats in the kitchen, and I screamed,” Albert recalled. “I caught one, and one got away.”

He spent more than a thousand dollars to hire an exterminator to seal up holes. However, he found more in the backyard and back side of the house, causing property damage to the concrete and foundation of his home. In August, he spent $25,000 on a landscaping upgrade that added new fencing, closed holes and redid the concrete foundation and sidewalk that were damaged by rats and overflowing garbage from his alley.

Albert lives behind Lyndale Place, a large apartment complex at 2575 W. Lyndale St. owned by The Habitat Company that has at least four dumpsters. Its dumpsters peak on weekends when most people throw their trash away, leading to a “rat buffet” that doesn’t usually get dealt with until Monday, Albert said.

Videos show rats congregating at the overflowing dumpsters.

The city’s Bureau of Sanitation collects free garbage for single-family homes and apartment buildings of four units or less, but larger apartment building owners must pay a private trash collection service for commercial pickup, per city rules.

After failed attempts at asking the building owners to either add another dumpster or to pay for trash pickup on weekends, Albert sued the company in small claims court for property damage. The case, filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County in July, sued The Habitat Company for $1,600 in property damage — the amount Albert spent on rat exterminator visits, he said.

Last month, he won the case and was awarded nearly $2,000, including fees, according to court documents.

“I am pleased about the win, but I don’t care about the money. … I don’t want there to be rats in my house,” Albert said.

Habitat Company owners and the attorney representing Habitat in Albert’s civil case did not reply to requests for comment.

More Tickets, Fewer Rats?

Chicago has been dubbed one of the rattiest cities in America for consecutive years. An audit earlier this year by the Office of Inspector General found that the city’s rodent abatement program is “unlikely to achieve longterm control of the rat population” due to an emphasis on reactive efforts rather than proactive solutions.

Multiple studies from 2018 and 2021 from Lincoln Park Zoo researchers that looked at public rat complaints citywide using 311 data found that infestations were more targeted in alleys with “uncontained garbage” and in denser neighborhoods. The studies suggested the issue could be mitigated by securing food waste from residential and commercial sources.

“Our results demonstrate that, at least in Chicago, public reporting can serve as a useful tool to identify areas of greater rat activity for targeted control efforts,” researchers wrote in the 2018 study.

Albert said he hoped the research can encourage neighbors to report rat complaints to the city with his petition, which has 34 signatures so far. He said he wants to see large residential building owners keep trash cans clean and secured, whether by paying a private waste management company to work weekends or adding more dumpsters.

There were over 39,000 rat complaints filed with 311 this year, according to city data. Last year, there were just over 44,000 — a decreasing number from years past, but it’s still a major issue.

The city spent more than $1 million in 2024 for rodent control services, and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed budget for 2027 includes expanded neighborhood services like more crews to tackle rat infestations, tree trimming and illegal dumping. The department would get five additional rodent control crews to tackle rat infestations across the city’s 50 wards for next year, according to the budget proposal shared last month.

More funding will allow the city to expand staffing, equipment and neighborhood coverage and “improve our ability to proactively address issues and respond to requests,” Gage said.

A rat birth control pilot program that started in Wicker Park last year has seen early results, with expansion efforts underway in Lincoln Park.

Neighbors have even relied on feral cats to catch and kill rats. But Albert believes ticketing on Sunday can be a simpler and more effective method to spark change.

“It’s such a simple and pretty much a revenue-neutral change: extra tickets funding the overtime [for city workers] to just go ticket overflowing dumpsters on Saturdays and especially Sundays,” he said. “That’s all it would take, and we would be in half the rats we have now, and so much less damage from these infestations.”

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