Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Mark Lennihan/AP Images; Alyssa powell/BINavigating New York City's economy can feel like a gauntlet of minor indignities. Selling ice cream, for some reason, requires two different permits. Want to quit your gym? You may have to send a certified letter by mail. Oh, and before you haul your belongings to that storage unit, you'd better read the fine print real carefully to see how much of a tease that teaser rate is.Zohran Mamdani is sweating this kind of small stuff. His administration is targeting the fees, scams, and bureaucratic headaches that make day-to-day life in New York slightly more annoying. They're going after rule-breaking parking lots and dentists, cracking down on convoluted cancellation policies, and cutting through the city's silliest red tape. New York has a reputation for being a home of petty scams — guys hustling Times Square tourists, businesses upcharging customers who don't know better. Residents are accustomed to working some angles in order to make city life work for them.Mamdani's actions, on their own, will not solve New York City's affordability crisis and, in some cases, may amount to little more than politically satisfying whack-a-mole. But his wager is that if you relentlessly whack enough moles, it adds up and earns goodwill to take bigger swings that aren't such gimmes."If government can do the things that materially improve the lives of New Yorkers, we can be trusted to do more," says Julie Su, New York City deputy mayor for economic justice.It's pocketbook pothole politics.A thing has started to happen where New Yorkers post videos of problems they notice around the city on social media and tag the mayor — hey, look, here's a pothole, there's a blocked sewer drain. In some cases, hours after asking him to do something about it, the issue gets fixed. While it's not always clear whether the call-outs are directly driving the patches, the trend reflects the atmosphere City Hall is fostering: There's no problem too small to fix.This is part of the death by a thousand cuts that New Yorkers feel.Mamdani won the election on big promises around issues such as housing and childcare, but almost immediately after taking office, his administration began making a conspicuous fuss about more modest irritants, too. In July, the mayor announced a finalized "click-to-cancel" rule that will take effect this fall. It requires businesses to make it as easy for people to quit a subscription as it was for them to sign up. His office also rolled out a proposed rule that would ban hidden "junk fees" on rental housing, event tickets, and other products and services, an issue he said he planned to tackle in the opening days of his administration.The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, under commissioner Sam Levine, has filed lawsuits against self-storage companies, dental providers, and solar companies over sketchy business practices such as bait-and-switch pricing and deceptive loans. It's cracked down on deceptive tipping practices by delivery apps and has secured restitution for freelancers at a local production company over late payment. The DCWP has sent tens of thousands of notices to businesses over noncompliance with New York City laws."This is part of the death by a thousand cuts that New Yorkers feel," Su says. "We have the broader agenda of bringing down prices in big ways — cost of housing, the cost of childcare, the cost of groceries — but we also have to make sure that we increase what people are able to keep in their pockets."Mamdani has also directed agencies to scrub away some of City Hall's own nuisances — duplicate permits, needless fines, and administrative mazes that can make running a small business a logistical nightmare. His administration announced 50 such proposed reforms this summer."Sometimes, government has a role to play in making it easier for businesses who want to do the right thing to do that," Su says.The theory of delivering on tangible, everyday victories to win over skeptics and concretely better working people's lives isn't floating down from nowhere. Mamdani is implementing a modern version of "sewer socialism," a 20th-century movement that originated in Milwaukee. It prioritized pragmatic reforms like — as the name suggests — fixing the sewer system. (The mayor prefers less ideologically charged rhetoric like "pothole politics.")These are the types of issues that people want their mayor to take on but also believe he can take on, says Eric Phillips, who served as former Mayor Bill de Blasio's press secretary. While mayors may want to tackle "more ideological, grandiose global policy," he says, constituents expect City Hall to get the streets plowed and make sure restaurant kitchens are clean. They think regulators should go after sketchy used car dealers, tax preparers, and landlords."The reality is that people want smaller, faster solutions to fees and annoying costs that feel much more real to their finance
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