How do you rebuild trust in the government? One pothole at a time.

“If this is democratic socialism,” wrote one New Yorker under a mayoral Facebook post, “maybe it is the change we need.” She was referring neither to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s heavily scrutinized plan for city-run grocery stores, nor to his pied-à-terre tax on the rich, nor even to his trademark — though thus far, unrealized — vision for fast, free buses and universal childcare. How do you rebuild trust in the government? One pothole at a time. A new brand of populism is working in NYC. Can it last? No, she was talking about candy-colored scaffolding. The mayor recently made good on his plan to give a facelift to the city’s ubiquitous scaffolding, that odiously ugly green eyesore that envelops hundreds of miles of New York City sidewalks. Another New Yorker posted on TikTok complaining about a smattering of potholes on his street. By the time he got home from work, they had all been filled, setting off a maelstrom of viral requests, including one from a dateless Brooklynite looking for love: “Zohran, what are you gonna do to fix this?” (The mayor cheekily obliged with a list of local meet-cute spots.) Symbolic urbanism is having a moment, especially this summer in New York City, where the air is far too humid, but the potholes increasingly get filled, sometimes personally by the internet’s favorite millennial mayor himself. Mamdani’s embrace of what he calls “pothole politics” — a shrewd modern-day twist on the “sewer socialism” that once propelled some 20th-century leftists into office — has delighted and exhilarated New Yorkers who’ve long yearned for a City Hall that heeded their most mundane municipal calls over a scorching-hot subway station or a sidewalk full of cracks. With a smile plastered on his face, Mamdani has, in fact, filled potholes at a faster rate than any New York City mayor in years. In cities where everything seems to take forever to build, literally covering over these sites of everyday urban friction has become a powerfully visible form of political currency. “There’s just this thirst for competence right now,” Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told me, and Mamdani in particular has “brought a sense of joy and fun to the nuts and bolts of public administration.” It may even be enough to help restore some of the public trust needed for the more arduous, less palatable work involved in making our cities more liveable in the long run. Sixty-nine percent of New Yorkers currently have a favorable view of Mamdani, according to a Siena Research Institute poll conducted earlier this month, meaning that he has already won over at least some of the one-third of residents who told the New York Times last September that they would never vote for him. He has higher ratings at this point in office than any NYC mayor in decades. He is even more popular now than he was a few months ago, when the Knicks clinched their first NBA championship in decades, the sort of sports victory that can quantifiably boost an incumbent’s electoral prospects. So, no, it’s not the Knicks that have made Mamdani even more popular than he was during his mayoral honeymoon. It is, quite possibly, the potholes. “There are easy issues for voters to understand about their local government, and then there are much more difficult issues,” said Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, a public policy professor at Harvard and author of the forthcoming book The Fog of Accountability. “When you make campaign promises about more difficult issues, you might pair them with some clear issues like potholes,” which are decidedly easy for voters to understand. But the bigger question is whether Mamdani or others like him can borrow from the public trust they earn from filling them to help move the needle on the hard stuff, “especially when those next things aren’t going to be what your constituents like as much,” like large-scale zoning reforms or tax hikes, he said. “They might be tougher policies to swallow.” Pothole populism, explained “If government can’t do the small things,” Mamdani declared at a rally to mark his first 100 days in office, “how could you ever trust it to do the big ones? How can we promise to transform our city if we can’t pave your street?” There’s plenty of data to back him up on this, not just in New York City but across the nation. For every extra week it takes their city to fix a nearby pothole, Chicagoans report being measurably less satisfied with their lives, according to one study. A separate survey found that Bostonites became 14 percent more trusting of their government after they were able to see it respond to complaints like potholes or broken street lamps. Much as doing the dishes or taking out the trash can be more romantic than the occasional pricey date night, these everyday municipal acts of service resonate with beleaguered urbanites. Mamdani is not the first politician to build political capital on the strength of small, some even symbolic or aesthetic, infrastructural upgrades. Milwaukee, for example, elected a slew of leftists roughly a century ago who earned the pejorative moniker “sewer socialists” for their focus on small-scale engineering projects. These mayors understood that “it was not manifestos or ideological pamphlets that would win hearts and minds. It was about proving to people that the government could do things that had a sort of broadly shared benefit,” said Philip Rocco, a professor of political science at Marquette University. “They were picking really low-hanging fruit as a way of building a coalition.” “There are easy issues for voters to understand about their local government, and then there are much more difficult issues. When you make campaign promises about more difficult issues, you might pair them with some clear issues like potholes.” — Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, public policy professor at HarvardMilwaukee’s 20th-century socialist mayors went on to double the city’s size through annexation and new housing, built a pioneering sewage treatment plant, and set up the nation’s first Bureau of Economy and Efficiency. Along the way, they installed new street lights, drinking fountains, park benches, and countless other low-cost urban fixes that made everyday life safer, healthier, and more joyful. By 1936, Time was running a cover story about how six-term Mayor Daniel Hoan, “one of the nation’s ablest public servants,” had transformed Milwaukee into “perhaps the best-governed city in the US.” Hoan won election after election not because of his party affiliation (to be clear, literally Socialist with a capital S), but in spite of it, wrote Time, his competence and charisma charming even most conservative Milwaukeeans. Mamdani, who often invokes Milwaukee’s sewer socialists, clearly craves a similar legacy. He is actively attempting to disprove the idea that progressives today “are disconnected from reality, and that they have a lot of pie-in-the-sky ideas,” Moynihan said, “but that they can’t actually govern” when it comes to the often unglamorous, nitty-gritty demands of public service. According to Moynihan, Mamdani may also be inheriting elements of another lineage; “broken windows” theory, though he may be less apt to say so. While it’s best known now for justifying controversial policing policies like stop-and-frisk, he said the approach also took seriously the idea that your “quality of life depends upon fixing the small things in your neighborhood.” Now what? If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then take note of the other local electeds beginning to engage in botched attempts to recreate Mamdani’s pothole politik. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass earned scorn a few weeks ago for voluntarily posting a video in which she fails to fix a pothole because of a car parked atop it. The road ahead will not, in fact, be paved with good intentions alone. But while Mamdani has clearly earned the trust of much of his city, what he will do with it is just starting to take shape. As Mayor Hoan showed a century ago, it’s one thing to fill a pothole with a scoop of asphalt, but it’s another to make your city’s housing more affordable or make the buses run faster. And yet, it is possible that the political symbolism he is curating today might indeed make the path ahead easier. Just this week, Mamdani announced his biggest infrastructure project to date, a mammoth 10-year, $4 billion rebuild of a crumbling section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which two past mayoral administrations have tried and failed to fix. Whether or not he can be the one to pull it off will hinge on the public trust he cultivates today. “If Mamdani wants to get things done quickly, he’s going to have to implement a lot of policies that are a mix of really popular but perhaps minimally effective,” said de Benedictis-Kessner, “and ones that are much more effective but definitely not as popular.” Take rent control, which is very popular with voters, but, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has pointed out, does little to fix the roots of our dysfunctional housing market. By embracing it anyway, Mamdani is signaling that “he’s doing something that listens to his constituents,” said de Benedictis-Kessner, and the trust he earns from doing so could ultimately make “less popular policies that are actually much bigger in scale” more politically viable, like zoning reforms or density bonuses for developers. What I really want, my own personal North Star for good municipal governance in New York, is the Interborough Express, a long-awaited light rail line connecting Brooklyn and Queens that probably won’t be finished until at least 2031. Those are the kind of large-scale urban renovations that I’ll be writing about — and sometimes advocating for — in my new Vox newsletter, Nice Things. (Seriously, sign up!) But in the interim, I will settle for somewhere I can lock up my bike without lugging it up the stairs, or a subway station that isn’t quite so sweltering in the summertime. The little fixes that make our days just a little smoother, while also maybe laying the foundations for big changes. No barrage of pothole-fixing blitzes will make the trains run on time or protect a city’s shore from flooding. But at a time when nobody thinks the government can do much of anything anymore, it’s a start. “To be able to argue, ‘Look, if you give me money, I will make things work,’” said Moynihan, “is a much more compelling argument if you can show that you are actually making things work.”