Across America, the provision of basic needs is in crisis. Electric, water, and sewer bills are soaring. Some communities face routine boil-water advisories; others virtually don’t have water at all anymore. In many places, these dire outcomes are driven by the fact that authority over local utilities—what a household pays, which neighborhoods the pipes reach, and where the revenue goes—is centralized and privatized. But a new wave of local politicians nationwide is working to take back control of city infrastructure and reassert municipal authority over the provision of services. What tools do they have to achieve this goal?
As I explain in work in progress on public utilities and home rule, the original “Sewer Socialists” offer one answer. Between 1910 and 1960, the socialists governing Milwaukee, Wisconsin, pursued a political project of entrenching public power by providing services no other level of government could and no private corporation should. As I argue in this brief post, this project was also a legal strategy. Their twofold thesis—that municipal ownership and control of utilities is a form of democratic power, not just a technical choice, and that the public-utility model entrenches private power under the guise of state regulation—is the ground on which today’s fight over water, sewer, and other local utilities should be understood and waged.
A City Democratic in Its Services
Sewer Socialism began from the premise that good governance is the prerequisite of a socialist commonwealth. The Milwaukee chapter of the Social Democratic Party, which built the movement in the late nineteenth century, drew that premise from its own base. Carl D. Thompson, one of the party’s lead organizers, recounted that he had been approached in an 1898 town hall by “An old German Comrade” who remarked: “Your theories of ‘Surplus Value’ and the future co-operative commonwealth are fine, but what we want to know is, how are we to raise our children in this community and work in these unsanitary factories in the meantime?”
When the party came to power twelve years later, it took this question to heart. The Sewer Socialists had inherited a defunded city hall, devastated by years of graft and favoritism. They had to reinvent the city, starting with the delivery of the most basic services. Twenty years later, Time Magazine celebrated Milwaukee as “perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.,” and through the 1930s and 1940s it frequently won first prize in annual “Healthiest City” contests held by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Public Health Association.
Daniel Hoan, the city’s mayor between 1916 and 1940 and perhaps the most prominent figure in this movement, explained in his 1936 book City Government how the party achieved this turnaround, describing what historian Daniel Rodgers called “a city democratic in its services.” The project tied local power over the city’s physical infrastructure to local power over its legal and social infrastructure. For instance, by raising the minimum wage for municipal workers and initiating new and expanded public work projects, the Sewer Socialists tackled both unemployment and local unsanitary conditions in one stroke. As Hoan put it, rebuilding “a sound economy in local finance” meant legally establishing “zoning, building code, [and] sewage.”
The Sewer Socialist legal approach was distinctive. First, they reclaimed the meaning of home rule, fighting to establish that it encompassed the local power to own and operate utilities and infrastructure. Indeed, when the Progressive-led Wisconsin legislature passed a home rule law in 1911, the Sewer Socialists petitioned against it as unconstitutional. Home rule, they argued, had to be entrenched into the Wisconsin Constitution: anything less still left the city subordinate to the state. The Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with Milwaukee and struck down the law; about a decade later, home rule was written into the state constitution through an amendment mainly drafted by Hoan.
Second, the Sewer Socialists opposed the great regulatory invention of the time—developed by economist John Commons at the nearby University of Wisconsin—the public utility model. The model, which amounted to state regulation of private utilities, appeared to the Sewer Socialists as another means of hampering public and local power. As the editors of the socialist Milwaukee Leader opined in 1912, the public utility model would “destroy municipal home rule” by guaranteeing “security of investment to the capitalist class … while preventing the people from owning the utilities they must use.” Having lost the political fight over home rule, the state was now trying to pull economic power over local services away from the city. Even where a city owned its utilities, state regulation of rates and services allowed private utilities to check municipal market power. Hoan put the conflict plainly: “At present, the users of public utility, generally known as the public, want better services and lower rates—the owners want more dividends and higher rates.… As long as the users are not the owners of property of that nature, then there will be a definite conflict of class interests.”
For the Sewer Socialists, “a sound economy” meant, first and foremost, keeping local services independent from private capital (i.e., not reliant on loans and bonds). To that end, they were not afraid to raise and celebrate taxes. They used any revenue they could to enrich their working-class denizens, both economically (through municipal unemployment bureaus) and culturally (by maintaining the city’s social clubs and initiating open concerts around the newly-built public parks). Milwaukee was also a nationwide leader in transferring revenue from its municipal waterworks to replenish the city’s general fund. In this way, they connected social, legal, and physical infrastructure to cultivate a local belonging and democratic capacity.
Sewer Socialism Today
A century later, with local infrastructure and utilities in critical condition, people have good reasons to turn to sewer socialism. Yet the challenges to reclaiming local authority persist as well. In many places, municipalization efforts are blocked by state and industry, as well as by courts with an ever-expanding takings jurisprudence. Moreover, after years of asset financing and inflated valuations, municipalization sometimes plays into the hands of utilities seeking to cash out. However, there are at least two important lessons that the Sewer Socialists offer to our present moment.
First, municipal ownership of utilities is a democratic power, both materially and constitutionally. Control over infrastructure is control over the conditions of local life and so belongs to the people who live there. Cities should expand municipal ownership even when it requires higher taxes and generates conflict with the state. Second, the public utility model is not a neutral regulatory alternative to municipal ownership but is a mechanism for entrenching private power. The alternative the model offers to local ownership is not centralization, but privatization: public resources invested in regulating how needs are provided, instead of decommodifying their provision.
Consider, for instance, a recent conflict over service provision in Florida, where the Republican state government seeks to curtail the blue City of Gainesville’s power. The state is trying to rein in the municipally owned water, gas, electricity and telecom utility by stripping the city council of its control over the utility: the state has created a commission, appointed by the governor, to run the utility and decide on rates, service provisions, and the allocation of utility revenue. In two local referenda, which passed with a 75% majority, Gainesville residents rejected this state takeover. While these referenda are challenged in state courts, the state is now planning to outright preempt the question altogether.
During this debate between city and state, the two sides raised questions of democracy, funding, and home rule. The state took the side of the suburbs serviced by Gainesville Regional Utilities, arguing that they are disenfranchised by having no governance stake on the utility’s board. City residents countered that disabling local control over the utility’s funds would weaken accountability and damage the city politically and economically. The argument closely tracks the Sewer Socialist fight for home rule: state utility regulation is a preemption of local power, and ahome rule worthy of that name must be read to include authority over local infrastructure and services.
That reading of home rule is a crucial bulwark against city disempowerment nationwide, as the broad trend toward privatizing local utilities, infrastructure, and services has recently reached water and sewer. In Pennsylvania and at least 11 other states, state Fair Market Value laws encourage the sale of municipally-owned water utilities to private companies. These laws change the valuation method for utilities and inflate their values by allowing utilities to include in the selling price intangible, forward-looking assets (such as projected future gains and brand goodwill), whereas book valuations are strictly limited to historical costs and depreciated physical assets. Such inflated sale prices in turn lead to inflated rates and diminished accountability. Here too, this move, where perceptible, is seen locally as a clash between local power and private greed, with local residents preventing such sales by initiating charter amendments. Taking a note from the Sewer Socialists, this fight should be seen for its broad political and economic implications: incentivizing further privatization of local utilities and infrastructure is a measure of disempowerment by impoverishment.
Sewers, Socialism, and Scale
Sewer socialism is gaining greater nationwide traction. In city after city, left local officials are branding themselves around infrastructure and basic services: from Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City, through Somerville’s Sidewalk Socialists and Pennsylvania’s Suburb Socialism, to Seattle’s Democrat-Socialist Mayor Katie Wilson, the prevalence of Pothole Politics is palpable. But among both supporters and skeptics, the same question arises: Is the city the right arena for this kind of social democracy, one focused on confronting private power head-on?
This question of scale, while no doubt pressing, misses something important: sewer socialism is as much about the sewer as it is about socialism. Our local, physical infrastructure is the most important social infrastructure we have, and power over it should be localized because it is already local. We should not hold local leaders accountable for bringing down the entire capitalist system; rather, we should make sure they are building and supporting the polity needed for such a process to take shape.
A politics of provision can also recruit where a politics of ideology cannot. This struggle is not just economic, but cultural as well. In Milwaukee, the Sewer Socialists campaigned in 12 languages spoken locally; they rallied around their cause as many voters as possible, even if they were not committed to socialism per se. Indeed, the moniker “Sewer Socialists” was awarded to the Milwaukee faction by their detractors from the left, who saw them as insufficiently committed to a socialist revolution and too focused on collecting garbage and building sewers. For the Milwaukee party, however, that was the revolution.
Some current local politicians seem to have grasped this. Mamdani campaigned in many of the languages spoken in New York. His voters, like the Milwaukee party, did not arrive en masse from a Marxist reading group. Supposedly, many Mamdani voters also voted for Trump a year prior; Mamdani explicitly tried to rally New Yorker Trump supporters, mobilizing the cause of affordability. As Mamdani recently put it, “There is only one majority in this country, that’s the working class.”
And providing for this majority is fundamental to running a city. Through their legal, political, and economic interventions, the Sewer Socialists offered a democracy built on services, one predicated on provision rather than simply participation. As we reflect on what lessons to take from this history, one of the most important is that this politics of provision cannot be separated from legal strategy. It is, in fact, what makes the strategy possible. Home rule and referendum victories don’t happen without a deep base mobilized to fight for mundane things like infrastructure. Because this mundanity is what sustains us: not provision as grift, but as democratic dignity.
