Cockroaches are a common urban pest. Though there are more than a thousand species of roaches, just a few are found in NYC homes.  The most common are American Cockroaches, typically found in moist basements and lower floors, and German Cockroaches, found anywhere inside homes.

Cockroaches like warm, dark places such as toasters, clocks, microwave ovens, walls, and cabinets.  They need regular access to food and water to live and breed.

Cockroaches and Health

Besides causing annoyance and stress, roaches are sources of allergens that can trigger asthma symptoms in sensitized individuals. Cockroaches also contaminate food, and may contribute to food borne illnesses. The often indiscriminate use of hazardous chemicals to try to control cockroaches - especially from sprays, bombs and foggers - causes many cases of poisonings each year in NYC.

About the Data and Indicators

Estimates of numbers and percentages of adults reporting cockroaches inside their residences are measured using surveys. The accuracy of survey data depends on the participants’ ability to recall and correctly report sightings of cockroaches.

Prevention

Simple steps can be taken to safely control these pests.

• Use caulk and plaster to seal holes and cracks in kitchen and bathroom walls, floors, ceilings and cabinets.
• Store food in sealed containers, and do not put out food for stray cats, pigeons or squirrels.
• Remove garbage daily from apartments, and put garbage on the curb as close to pickup time as possible. Use hard plastic or metal cans with tight fitting lids.
• Wash and dry dishes after each use.
• Use only safer pest control products such as boric acid, gels and baits for cockroaches. Apply boric acid where roaches are active (but away from children). Use behind cabinets, under refrigerators and in cracks and crevices before they are sealed. Place cockroach bait stations or apply gel bait in areas where you see roach droppings, egg cases, live or dead roaches.
• Avoid use of foggers, bombs and sprays. Never use products called “Tempo” or “Roach Chalk”.

Key Messages

In 2003, adults in nearly 30% of NYC households (874,000 households) reported having cockroaches in their home.

Tenants are entitled to safe and decent housing. All building owners are required by law to provide homes free of pests, and to employ maintenance practices that prevent and treat for the presence of roaches. Chemical-only approaches to pest control are generally insufficient to prevent and manage infestations.

The Health Department offers detailed guides on how to safely prevent and manage pests in the home.

There are many schemes of neighborhood boundaries (or geographies) available for different datasets. These include:

• Citywide
• Borough
• United Hospital Fund 42 (UHF42) and United Hospital Fund 34 (UHF34) neighborhoods
• Community Districts (CD), and, related, Community District Tabulation Areas (CDTA)
• Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA)
• Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTA)

We try to make data available at as fine a geographic resolution as we can. Read more about different geographies at this data story.

It would be convenient if each dataset could be made available at the same geography, but this is not always possible. The neighborhood boundaries available depend on the specifics of the underlying dataset.

When we have multiple years of data, we show the data as trend charts.

Trends for individual neighborhoods tend to be very unstable (or "bouncy"), due to small counts for outcomes in individual neighborhoods. To show clearer trends, we usually aggregate up and show trend data by Borough.

Options on some indicators let you compare this indicator to other similar indicators.

We try to make data available as soon as we can.

Many datasets take a long time to reach us — a "lag" of several years, during which data are gathered from different entities to try to create a complete dataset; data are processed (cleaned, deduplicated, etc), and analyzed. It can take several years to prepare a dataset — so a dataset that is several years old is sometimes the most up-to-date information available. Still, this data continues to show us valuable trends and insights.

We also try to display datasets that have been available for many years. Some datasets (like those that are asked on surveys) are not asked every year of the survey, which means that we cannot provide annual data.

For some datasets, we have to aggregate time periods in order to break down data by borough or neighborhood.

Measures are the numeric ways that a dataset (or indicator) are expressed. Examples of different measures might be: number, percent or rate.

A number tells us how much of an outcome is in a certain area. But a rate (usually expressed as, for example, 40 per 100,000) tells us how much of an outcome there is, relative to the population of the area in question. This lets us compare neighborhoods of different sizes.

On this site, we try to show how environmental factors might be connected to health outcomes. One way we do this is with Correlates. We choose potentially-related datasets and display them on a scatterplot so you can see how these two datasets are correlated.

The Disparities view displays neighborhoods by poverty category to show underlying disparities in the data.

Read more about correlation here.