Follow the Rats: America’s Worst-Run Cities Share a Common Thread
Look at who runs these cities. Notice anything?
Once a year, Terminix tallies the cities where Americans call most often about rats. The newest ranking has a familiar ring: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, Dallas, and Detroit, which moved up from eleventh place to take the last spot.
Look at who runs these cities. Notice anything?
Democrats hold City Hall in nine of the ten. The only exception is Dallas, and even there the asterisk is fresh: Mayor Eric Johnson didn’t switch to the Republican Party until 2023. The rats may not have gotten the memo yet. News moves slowly underground.
Rats are not a talking point. They are a symptom: a living audit of whether a city government can handle the basics, like collecting garbage, maintaining infrastructure and enforcing the law. Lay the rat map over every other measure of urban dysfunction and the same names keep turning up.
Crime. U.S. News & World Report, using FBI data, ranks Memphis, San Francisco/Oakland, New York, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and Cleveland as the most dangerous. Memphis recorded roughly 2,500 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2024, about six and a half times the national average, with a murder rate of 40.6. San Francisco/Oakland ran near 1,925, five times the national norm. St. Louis came in around 1,860. Baltimore has the second-highest murder rate of any large American city.
Filth. Lawn Starter’s 2025 “Dirtiest Cities” study draws on CDC, Census, Labor Department and EPA data for 303 cities. It ranks San Bernardino first, followed by Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia and Ontario, California. The study measures pollution, decrepit housing, broken waste systems and fed-up residents. The rats would feel right at home, and they do.
Poverty. Detroit and Cleveland have the worst and second-worst poverty rates among large cities. Cleveland “improved” to 28.3% in 2024, which still leaves more than one in four residents poor. Memphis, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Baltimore and Houston follow close behind.
Drugs. In the year ending August 2025, Baltimore lost roughly 110 residents per 100,000 to overdoses. A New York Times–Baltimore Banner investigation found its 2018–2022 death rate was nearly double any other large cities. San Francisco lost more than 580 people over the same period, about 70 per 100,000, or more than three times the national rate. Philadelphia, D.C., Milwaukee and Memphis are not far behind.
Prosecutors. There is one more layer: district attorneys elected with help from George Soros’s network of PACs. Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner is the poster child. Soros-affiliated money put nearly $1.7 million into his first race. Prosecutors like him campaigned on lighter charging, looser bail and fewer prosecutions, and they delivered.
Stack these lists on top of one another and the picture is hard to ignore. Rats, murder, filth, poverty and overdoses cluster in the same places, and those places share a governing model: one-party Democratic machines and progressive prosecutors who treat enforcement as optional.
Defenders will say that nearly every big city is run by Democrats, so of course the worst ones are too. That is exactly the point. Several of these cities have had Democratic mayors for half a century or more. They are not swing towns that change hands with every election, where blame can be passed back and forth. They are political monopolies, and monopolies grow complacent. When the same party controls City Hall for generations, nobody else is left to blame for the garbage on the curb or the dead bodies on the corner.
Which comes first, the rats or the rot? Causation can run in more than one direction. But the pattern is not random. A city that cannot keep its streets clean will struggle to keep them safe. A city that won’t prosecute shoplifters is unlikely to fix a failing garbage contract either. Neglect becomes a governing philosophy, and it shows up everywhere at once: in the alley, the emergency room and the morgue.
The people who pay the highest price are not the same old politicians. They are working families in neighborhoods where the bus stop doubles as a drug market. They are small business owners who board up their windows after the third break-in, and children who learn to step around needles on the way to school. Those who can afford to leave, most certainly do. Those who can’t are left behind with the rats, more and more rats.
For decades, residents of these cities have been told their problems are too complex, too structural and too entrenched to fix. Yet other cities manage to collect the trash and lock up violent offenders. The difference isn’t fate. It’s leadership.
The rats have voted with their feet. Their verdict is that these cities are open for business: theirs. It’s time residents delivered a verdict of their own.
