Zohran Mamdani’s 100 Days of 21st-Century Sewer Socialism
In his first one hundred days as mayor, Zohran Mamdani has realized that New Yorkers — and all Americans — need to see the government working for them.
March Madness is over, spring is here, and Morrisania, a neighborhood in the Bronx, is getting a resurfaced basketball court. The Lower East Side in Manhattan is getting a water fountain repaired, Sunset Park in Brooklyn is getting dispensers for dog poop bags, playground fencing in Morris Park in the Bronx is being fixed, a handball wall is being painted in East Harlem, Staten Island tennis courts are getting windscreens, and the illegal dumping in Soundview in the Bronx is being cleaned up.
It’s all part of “Municipal Madness,” which the mayor announced in a video called “The Fix Is In,” costarring WNBA star Natasha Cloud, set on a basketball court with a broken hoop. It was a competition — but not one in the Hunger Games style — of the city’s annual participatory budgeting, in which neighbors devise elaborate marketing campaigns to see who will get a new swing on their playground.
Mamdani’s plan is for all sixteen of these problems, nominated by New Yorkers, to be fixed. Over 21,000 people voted on which of these tasks Mayor Mamdani would perform himself on his one hundredth day as a democratic socialist mayor of America’s largest city. The winner: cleaning up illegal dumping in Soundview.
The initiative shows how Mamdani turns mundane governance into great showmanship, spotlighting the small and often uncelebrated ways city government can improve our daily lives. Think of a water fountain at your kid’s school, a trash can on the street, an open bathroom in the park: things you barely notice when they’re there but when you need them and they’re absent, you fume — and lose a little more faith in your government.
This is Mamdani’s version of “sewer socialism,” a phrase that comes from Milwaukee’s long reign of municipal socialist governance last century. Mamdani has cited Milwaukee as an inspiration, but the term is more than a metaphor: the city is making a $108 million investment in upgrading the city’s sewer infrastructure, to protect the city from flooding by modernizing more than 6,700 catch basins over the next decade.
In a recent press release, the Mamdani administration does describe its approach as “sewer socialism,” but it also uses the term “quality of life,” a phrase that became right-coded during the Rudy Giuliani era, when it meant harshly policing minor infractions like graffiti. By contrast, under Mamdani, that phrase implies an effort to renew American faith in government and make our daily lives better through care for the commons.
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By Liza Featherstone, April 10, 2026
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