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Providing easier access to trash disposal infrastructure, complemented by community-oriented and instructional communications, will significantly reduce the amount of trash visible on NYCHA grounds.

A 2-part intervention: a redesign of the trash disposal infrastructure – new large trash containers placed at convenient locations to residential buildings – to reduce compliance costs for residents and a package of indoor and outdoor posters communicating the new policy, to reduce learning costs
The full intervention
package, decided in consultation with NYCHA property managers based on potential impact and feasibility
and designed with direct input from residents (Barrows et al., 2020), included providing 100-gallon Tough Guy
or Rubbermaid tilt trucks (1-2 per building), 50-gallon Rubbermaid trashcans (2-3 per building), and a full suite
of posters (6 inside versions for lobbies and hallways and 3 outside versions) to provide sufficient coverage to
reach all residents in the development.
NYCHA developments targeted for Neighborhood Rat Reduction1 programs in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and
Manhattan were randomly assigned to be treatment (n=27) and control (n=26) groups. Property managers for
each NYCHA development in the treatment group were given recommendations on where to place intervention materials within and around residential buildings but were ultimately given discretion on which of the
materials supplied were installed, when, and where.

Given significant delays in roll-out, our primary analysis estimated the effect of the intervention being installed
using difference-in-difference (Goodman-Bacon, 2018) negative binomial regressions in the form of:
??, ? = ?0 + ?1?????????????,? +?2???????????????,?+?3 ????? +?4????? + ?5??,? + ??, ?
where Yi, t is the dependent variable at site i in time t; “Intervention” represents whether or not site i had
received the intervention in time t; “Implementation” is a dummy variable for the week we first observed the
intervention; “week” and “site” are temporal and geographic fixed effects; θi,t is a vector of other data collection
fixed effect controls, and ε is the error term.
All models include site and week fixed effects. Standard errors were clustered by development. We also
include models with RA fixed effects, day of week fixed effects, and data collection hour fixed effects. Our
primary specification includes all data collection fixed effects (Gerber & Green, 2012) given the wide variation
in trash counts based on the time, day, and individual collecting data

The study included 53 NYCHA developments, which were randomized to treatment assignment. Larger developments were then split into smaller units for data collection based on the number of buildings and ground
area that one RA could reasonably assess on their own, and thus were assigned to different RAs