A little over one hundred days ago, many of the loudest voices in media and politics were warning that New York City stood on the brink of catastrophe.
The rich would flee. Business would collapse. The streets would become ungovernable. The city itself, we were told, was about to become a cautionary tale simply because a man had the audacity to say out loud that working people deserved a government that worked for them.
And yet here we are.
Not in the ruins. Not in the ashes of civilization. Not standing in some smoldering crater left behind by rent protections, child care expansion, and the dangerous socialist idea that people should be able to afford food.
Instead, what we are seeing is something much more threatening to the people who profit from despair: competence.
That was always the real fear. Not chaos. Not dysfunction. Not collapse. The fear was that Mamdani might actually begin to prove that government can still be used to materially improve ordinary life. That politics does not have to be an endless management of decline. That a city does not have to be run as a concierge service for capital, with everyone else told to be grateful for the scraps.
In just over 100 days, the administration has not accomplished everything it promised. No serious person expected that. But it has done something more important: it has made those promises legible as governance. Universal child care is no longer just a campaign line. The city secured a $1.2 billion investment with the state, launched its first 2-K rollout, made most 2-K seats full-day and full-year, and expanded 3-K capacity. That is not theory. That is not branding. That is the early architecture of a city saying to parents: you matter, your time matters, your life matters.
Housing has not been magically fixed, because no mayor can wave away a crisis decades in the making. But the administration moved on day one to revive tenant protections, intervene against negligent landlords, and create mechanisms meant to hear directly from renters instead of only from the people extracting wealth from them. Even the still-unfinished fight over a rent freeze has already shifted the terrain. The point is not only the final vote. The point is that tenants are no longer treated as background noise in their own city.
And then there is the question that always reveals what a politics actually values: who is expected to pay?
For decades, austerity has come dressed as maturity. Whenever ordinary people need anything, we are told the cupboard is bare. But when wealth concentrates upward without limit, somehow that is simply the natural order of things. Mamdani’s first budget rejected that script. It said plainly that the fairer path is to raise revenue from the wealthiest New Yorkers and the most profitable corporations rather than balance the city on the backs of working and middle-class people. Whether Albany grants every part of that vision remains to be seen. But even naming the conflict correctly is a break from the bipartisan lie that the only realistic politics is managed surrender.
The grocery-store plan is another good example of why the panic merchants keep sounding so silly. A city-run grocery system was treated as though it were a declaration of war against civilization itself. And yet the first 100 days have shown something much more grounded: identify sites, set standards, use public leverage to lower the price of essentials, and build a model that says food is too important to leave entirely to extraction and price gouging. The Manhattan site has already been identified at La Marqueta in East Harlem, with the broader five-borough plan underway. The world has not ended because someone suggested that bread and eggs should cost less.
What makes all of this so clarifying is that socialism, at least in the form Mamdani is advancing, is not some alien ideology descending from the sky. It is embarrassingly intuitive. If child care is essential, fund it. If rent is crushing people, protect tenants. If food prices are absurd, intervene. If buses are too slow, speed them up. If the city needs revenue, ask more from those who have taken the most. Strip away the branding wars and what remains is almost insultingly simple: government should make life more livable.
And New Yorkers, despite all the noise, seem to understand that. The praise is not literally universal, because nothing in politics is. But the broad reaction has been clear enough to puncture the hysteria. Marist found him net positive on approval, personally favorable, widely seen as hardworking, caring, and a unifying force, with most saying the city is moving in the right direction. Emerson found similar strength on the very issues critics claimed would doom him, especially child care and housing affordability. Even the city comptroller, while raising legitimate fiscal concerns, credited the administration with a more transparent and honest budget than what came before. That matters. Because one of the great frauds of the last era was confusing elite comfort with public consent.
This is why the first 100 days matter beyond New York.
They suggest that socialism can work not because it is utopian, but because it begins from a more accurate moral premise: that a city is not an investment vehicle with a population attached to it. It is a shared human project. And when that project is organized around dignity instead of deference to wealth, things that once seemed impossible suddenly start to look a lot like policy.
That is what so many critics never understood. Hope is not naïveté. Solidarity is not weakness. And governing for the many is not the end of a city.
Sometimes it is the beginning of giving it back to its people.