Miami Creeps onto List of Most Cockroach-Infested Cities

Here in the Magic City, residents have to deal with astronomical rental prices, constant traffic gridlock, and frequent flooding.

As if that weren't bad enough, we're condemned to share our fair city with an untold number of sewer-dwelling, six-legged creepy-crawlers.

According to a new survey by Pest Gnome, Miami is the sixth-most roach-infested city in the nation — a ranking that may come as no surprise to longtime denizens familiar with finding cockroaches of uncanny size scurrying across their kitchens in the middle of the night.

The exterminator-referral company compiled the list of "The 25 Roachiest Cities in America" based on U.S. Census survey results, Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the prevalence of local pest control workers, and climate info from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.

Houston sits atop the list with 37 percent of homes showing signs of roaches over the last year. San Antonio comes in second and Tampa third.

Pest Gnome notes that roaches thrive in warm, humid environments, which explains their abundance in the Magic City. Some of the most common indoor species — which on any given night, Miamians might find lurking in cabinets or eyeing them from their bedroom floor — are the smokey brown cockroach, Oriental cockroach, brown-banded cockroach, German cockroach, and the chunkiest of them all: the American cockroach, which is typically around an inch-and-a-half long.

Insect expert William Kern, an entomology professor at University of Florida, noted that the roaches that favor living inside human homes represent a small fraction of cockroach species worldwide.

"The four main pest cockroaches in the U.S. are the same four species found in every major city in the world. In nature, cockroaches are scavengers that clean the environment of rotting fruit, fungi, decomposing plant matter," Kern told Pest Gnome.

Of course, the census data used for the "roachiest" cities list does not account for the critters that people can't see, living in the crevices and walls of their homes or under the streets in city sewer infrastructure, where roaches colonize and feed on human excrement.

Though Florida's native roach species generate enough gagging and late-night screams to go around, New Times has documented a few new arrivals to the Sunshine State.

In 2015, an environmental scientist discovered a pale-bordered field cockroach, native to Central America and the Caribbean, crawling in his office in Central Florida. He told New Times the invasive roach species could wind up in South Florida. A year later, a NOAA researcher was walking on Virginia Key when he noticed a roach that was a much larger version of the palmetto bug at more than 4 centimeters long. He eventually discovered it was an invasive West Indian Leaf cockroach that was reproducing on Virginia Key.