Rats, amirite? After decades of suffering rat infestations, New York City’s Department of Sanitation came up with a brilliant idea: Put garbage in sealed bins. You know, like they do in most other places. What could possibly go wrong?

Last week, Mahmoud Kasem opened a pair of rusted steel doors in the sidewalk in front of his business, the Al-Aqsa Bakery & Restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and descended into the mucky darkness of a small basement.

By squishing, stacking and cramming, Mr. Kasem can squeeze an almost infinite number of black plastic trash bags into this underground space. But bins — particularly the wheeled ones the city now requires restaurants and smaller apartment buildings to use — can’t be squished or stacked. His bakery generates enough trash to fill 12 bins three times a week. But Mr. Kasem has no place to put them all.

“I’ll be honest: This garbage thing really stresses me out, man,” said Mr. Kasem, 37. “I want someone to come down here and tell me where I’m going to put all these buckets. There’s just no space.”

There are big garbage bins that are left at the curb, because there is no place to put the smaller bins that can be taken in and out. Problem solved?

Albatina Harris, 37, said she used to spend an hour a week searching for parking in West Harlem. Now it can take nearly three hours every time she moves her car, she said, because so many parking spots have been lost to containers.

If you live there, maybe the trade-off is worth it. But if not, how many hours are you willing to lose to finding a parking space, especially after Citibikes has already eaten up such a large amount of curb real estate?

And what happens when your bins are full?

“It’s killing us,” said Chris Athineos, whose family owns several residential buildings in Bay Ridge, as well as in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Park Slope and Prospect Heights. “When the cans are full, they’re full. I don’t know what to do with the rest of the garbage.”

Even the simple mechanics of taking out the trash has become a costly problem.

Others find the trade-offs unacceptable. “I pay the super to take the garbage out,” said Alva Badillo, who owns four small buildings with residential and commercial tenants in Queens and Brooklyn. “Now I’m expecting him to lug the garbage cans back in the morning. So he’s going to want more money, which is a drag.”

Dominick Romeo, the super for a 60-unit building in Chelsea, said his work on the evening before a trash pickup day used to end at 5 p.m., when he finished bringing as many as 60 bags to the curb.

Now, under the city’s new rules — which were designed to limit the amount of time trash sits in public walkways — he is not allowed to put the bags out until 8 p.m. Sometimes he doesn’t finish until 10. Bins brought to the curb must be retrieved early in the morning, before they are stolen or blown away. In between, he said, he has little time for sleep.

Young people complain, rather bitterly in many instances, about the high cost of rentals in the city. Many take the position that landlords, upon whom their lives rely, are evil monsters who should run residential charities so they can enjoy wonderful apartments at little cost. And then comes the city, adding substantial expenses to landlords’ already exorbitant cost of city building management. Contrary to what these tenants believe, landlords are not that charitable.

Foreseeable and unforeseen problems somehow seem to never make it to the surface when government extols the virtues of its new and improved solutions to intransigent problems. Like rats. Rats are disgusting and certainly a problem in need of fixing. And yet, New York City wasn’t built to handle garbage containers, whether large or small, that would prevent rats from feasting on the contents of black plastic bags that have nourished them when slices of pizza were unavailable.

For those whose foremost concern is the eradication, or at least some control, over the rat population, the price of having sealed containers is worth it. For those who are left to deal with the logistics of sealed containers, whether at the curb, in dank basements or late at night and early in the morning, the tradeoff can’t be accomplished. The laws of physics do not evaporate in proportion to the rat population.

So what can be done?

Besides, Mr. Goodman [of the Sanitation Department] said, if one building were to win a special dispensation, the department would be overwhelmed by requests for exceptions, to the benefit of the rats.

“These rules exist for a reason,” Mr. Goodman said. “They are not capricious. They exist to improve quality of life for all eight and a half million of us.”

No, they are not capricious. They are also untenable for a great many businesses and buildings, much like Brownstones with front stoops meeting the Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility mandate. It’s not that the idea is bad, or that the tradeoff isn’t worth it to a great many people, although it might not be. It’s that compliance with a salutary law isn’t always possible no matter how much people want to comply or how much a city refuses to recognize the impossibility of compliance.

But rats.