Mayor Zohran Mamdani filled a cavernous venue in Maspeth, Queens on Sunday with thousands of supporters and city workers to mark his first 100 days in office and continue building the popular support that led him there.
In a 35-minute speech, the city’s 112th mayor put the spotlight on the employees who keep the city running – and on his administration’s wins and promise of what could come.
“New York City is the greatest city in the world because of the millions of people who labor tirelessly each and every day to make it so,” he said at the Knockdown Center, a former door factory that now usually hosts concerts.
“Nothing is too big for New York City to take on. And over the past 14 weeks, we have proved that there is no task too small either.”
In a surprise, Mamdani brought out his political icon, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who he’d rallied with hours before at a pro-union event in Manhattan.
“What you are doing, and what the mayor is doing, is providing hope and inspiration not only to people all across our country, but honestly, all across the world,” he said.
Mamdani fully embraced his democratic socialism, repeating that he was “elected as a Democratic socialist, and I will govern as a Democratic socialist.”
Referring to his approach as “pothole politics,” Mamdani said of his avowedly socialist approach that it would deliver tangible results for New Yorkers, since “the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery.”
Renee Boyd, a 37-year Department of Transportation employee who is now the highest ranking female field worker for the agency, spoke about her passion for keeping the city moving.
“It’s our love letter to the city,” she said on stage about the work of filling in the bumps all across city streets. The little fixes meant a lot to New Yorkers, she said.
“City government should be as fixated on your daily frustrations as you are,” she said.
Amidst the passionate speech he announced that all of the city-funded grocery stores would open by the end of his first term, with the first opening this year at La Marqueta in East Harlem. He committed to full residential trash containerization in at least one community district in each borough by the end of the year.
And — after acknowledging earlier this week that his promise of free buses, which needs Albany’s approval, is unlikely to come to fruition this year, he announced immediate plans for the Department of Transportation to help speed up buses by 20% on 45 routes across the city.
The rousing rally capped the months-long countdown to his 100th day in office, which was on Friday, when he was in Soundview in the Bronx cleaning up trash and debris from illegal dumping on a residential street.
That trash corner was the winner of “Municipal Madness,” an online contest where New Yorkers could vote on problems, from a broken streetlight to a repaved basketball court, for Mamdani to personally fix. (All of the other options were addressed by city workers.)
“No problem too big, no task too small,” he said while joining sanitation workers to bag up garbage mounds of discarded coffee cups and license plates.
“Because New Yorkers cannot trust City Hall to deliver on something as transformative as universal childcare if they don’t see City Hall delivering on the smallest problems in their lives.”
At his inauguration, Mamdani vowed to “govern expansively and audaciously.”
But he’s been met with the realities of leading the city in what he’s framing as a financial crisis that isn’t his fault but is now his problem.
‘We’re Going to Right the Ship’
In interviews with THE CITY last week, he reflected on the conversations he’s had with New Yorkers since taking office on Jan. 1.
“What I’ve found is that people care very much, and they’re quite fluent on the issues that they care about,” he said.
Mamdani offered reassurances about his commitment to solving some of the city’s biggest problems – although without many details.
“We want to make clear we will fulfill our obligations, and we’re going to right the ship by actually balancing our budget,” he said when asked about the Health Insurance Stabilization Fund, a taxpayer-subsidized fund run the city and its labor unions that’s intended to keep their premiums from skyrocketing. In December, then Comptroller Brad Lander found the fund owed the city at least $3.1 billion, and recommended it be dissolved.
When pressed on specifics for fixing its finances, the mayor said his administration planned to put any surplus money back into reserves.
As a candidate, Mamdani supported a bill that would automatically give paraprofessionals at city public schools a $10,000 raise. But last month, his administration testified at a City Council hearing stating that doing so would violate the Taylor Law, which requires all wages to be bargained with municipal unions.
“I think that it’s still something that’s critically important, that those who work for the city can afford to live in the city,” the mayor told THE CITY. “I also think we want to look at the process by which we do this to ensure that it’s sustainable and that it’s tenable.”
On his contentious budget negotiations with the City Council, Mamdani said there’s a disconnect between the two sides of City Hall on where cuts can be made to help fill a $5.4 billion hole over the next two years as he pushes for Albany to fulfill his campaign promise to hike taxes on the rich as the state continues negotiating its now now overdue budget. .
Speaker Julie Menin released a proposal earlier this month which found savings without drawing from the city’s reserves or raising property taxes, the one lever the city has to boost funds without support from the state government. The mayor, who has said those two moves would be necessary if more money isn’t coming from the state, called the Council’s plan “unrealistic” at the time.
“We don’t see those savings when we look at those numbers, whether we’re talking about the savings from vacancies or debt service, or we’re talking about what they anticipate in increased revenues to be received,” he told THE CITY last week.
The other financial concern across New York City is job losses. Last year, the city lost 20,000 jobs – after economists had expected an increase of 40,000 jobs.
Mamdani told THE CITY that he wants “to encourage businesses to come, grow and stay in the city, also to create the conditions for that to happen” in terms of the quality of life and cost of living here.
But the mayor, who’s yet to appoint a new president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, didn’t share a broader plan for job growth.
‘Housing Is the Problem’
At the Knockdown Center, Brittany Root Ekstro, a 43-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America, came from Yorkville with her 6-year-old daughter Maeva.
Both of them, Brittany said, had started canvassing for Mamdani just after he announced his mayoral run in October of 2024.
“I’m a big supporter, so it would take a lot for me to be upset about anything,” she said. “But I feel like he hit the ground running and he tackled the things that he promised, like the potholes, that really affects people. The 2K being rolled out so quickly … it was breathtaking for me to hear that actually being announced.”
Maeva, who wore an embroidered “Cats for Zohran” denim jacket, shrugged her shoulders when asked what she liked most about the mayor.
Sam Mezbah, 55, was one of the first to arrive, getting on line at around 3 for a spot in front of the stage.
He’s a benefits specialist for the Human Resources Association and said his biggest concern in Tier 6, the reform approved in 2012 that slashed pension benefits and raised the retirement age for some newer hires.
He’s been happy so far, and said he’s going to give the new mayor another six-month grace period. “A broken system is very hard to put back together,” he said.
Gisele Hearne, 64 and from Harlem, is part of the organization Parents Supporting Parents, which supported the mayor on the campaign.
“We liked some of the things that he stood for, but now is the time to actually hold the mayor accountable for some things that we would like to see happen,” she said.
Her biggest disappointment has been the city’s appeal of a court order to expand a city-funded housing voucher program known as CityFHEPS.
“Housing is the problem. Housing is the reason why we all paid attention to him, right? And for you to come in and cut a program that is really needed,” she said. “Mamdani, it is time you give us some answers.”
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