As Gov. Gretchen Whitmer celebrates Detroit’s ongoing 60-year “renaissance,” the Motor City is moving up in another ranking that conflicts with the official narrative.

Pest control company Orkin released its “Top 50 Rattiest Cities List” on Monday, with Detroit moving up the rankings for the third year in a row.

“This year’s data was collected by tracking new residential rodent treatments from September 1, 2023, to August 31, 20204,” according to the study. “This data helps Orkin better understand how likely homeowners in each city are to have a rodent problem.”

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Following rankings of 10^th in 2022 and 9^th in 2023, Detroit came in as the 8^th rattiest city in the country for 2024, well ahead of larger cities including Boston, Seattle, San Diego, Dallas, and Phoenix.

The findings show Michigan is among the rattiest states in the country, with Grand Rapids in 27^th and Flint in 42^nd, making it one of only 10 states with multiple cities on the list.

New York is perhaps the rattiest with five cities listed, while California has four, Ohio and Florida with three, and Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, and South Carolina with two each.

The rattiest city in America for the 10^th straight year Orkin has complied the list: Chicago.

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“Other large cities face similar challenges with rats. Los Angeles, ranked #2, and New York, ranked #3, have been among the top three Rattiest Cities since 2017,” researchers wrote. “Of the 50 cities, New York state is represented the most, with five cities making the list: New York, Albany, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse.”

Detroit’s ranking as the 8^th rattiest in the country comes as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defends the city against recent remarks from former President Donald Trump in Detroit that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit if (Vice President Kamala Harris) is your president.”

“I’ve been talking about it for the last year,” Trump said at another stop in Chicago. “It’s just horrible because we’ve been talking about Detroit’s coming back for 40 years, and it’s never come back.”

Whitmer took issue with “Donald Trump … taking smack about Detroit” in an X video last week in which she claimed “America would be so lucky to end up like us.”

The roughly 69% of city residents who cannot afford a “survival budget” that covers basics like food, rent, child care, and transportation, including about 30% living under the federal poverty level, may disagree.

The data comes from a 2024 United for ALICE report that shows 171,907 of the city’s 249,518 households are living paycheck to paycheck, while another study found Detroit ranked 146^th out of 148 cities for the percent of the population living in poverty. The same study found Detroit’s unemployment rate was the second worst in the nation.

The issue is fueled in part by raging inflation, with Detroit ranked third in the U.S. among two dozen metropolitan areas in a study of “cities with the biggest inflation problems.”

The crushing poverty is one of many reasons cited by experts for 65.8% of Motor City students missing 10 or more days of school per year. The chronic absenteeism rate, more than double Michigan’s depressing 29.5% rate, ties into embarrassingly low student achievement.

It also contributes to Detroit’s rampant violent crime.

A recent analysis of the “Safest Cities in America” that examined 182 U.S. cities across 41 key indicators of safety to “determine where Americans can feel the most secure” ranked Detroit nearly dead last, just ahead of last place Memphis.

Over the July 4 weekend, shootings at six separate illegal block parties left three dead and 24 others injured, including one where police recovered more than 100 shell casings at the scene. Crime data analyzed by the Detroit Free Press shows since 2013, there’s been at least 166 shootings involving four or more victims in Michigan, and nearly half took place in Detroit.