Don't let Pizza Rat fool you -- New York City is not the rodent capital of the United States.

That honor goes to Philadelphia, with Boston coming in second among major metropolitan areas, according to census data analyzed by Governing magazine.

The Census Bureau's American Housing Survey includes a question about whether mice and rats have been been spotted in a housing unit in the last year. And according to governing's analysis, Northeastern metro areas topped the chart -- led by Philadelphia, which reported sightings in 17.7 percent of households in the 2015 survey.

Boston came next, with 16.9 percent, with New York City third at 15.3 percent. Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee rounded out the top five at 13.1 and 11.1 percent of households reporting the presence of mice or rats.

The dense populations and centuries-old infrastructure of Northeastern cities help sustain rat populations that thrive in subway and sewer systems, National Pest Management Association chief entomologist Jim Fredericks told Governing.

"These old cities have had entrenched rat populations since colonial times," Fredericks said.

The consequences of rat infestations extend beyond unnerving rodent-phobic tenants and homeowners; rats can cause property damage and electrical fires by chewing on wires, and in rare cases can still spread diseases, Governing notes.

There were 3,524 rodent complaints in the city of Boston last year, WCVB reported at the time -- a 28 percent increase since 2014. The city took longer to resolve complaints in poorer neighborhoods, WCVB reported, an outcome that the Boston Inspectional Services Department blamed on absentee landlords who did not respond to notifications.

Those statistics only include complaints received by the city of Boston; the census bureau's Boston metro area extends to Boston, Cambridge, Newton and other surrounding communities.

Last year, Boston began killing rats using dry ice, the Boston Globe reported. The method involved packing frozen carbon dioxide into rat burrows, suffocating the nest, and was praised by city officials as a more humane and cheaper solution than convention rat poisons.

But the Environmental Protection Agency put a stop to the program last December -- not out of sympathy for Boston's skittering rat population, but because the city had failed to properly register the CO2 as a pesticide, the NECN reported.