Podcast
After Hours with Jamie Rubin: A Vital City Podcast
Hosted by Jamie Rubin · EN
It's all bigger in New York City: personalities, problems, solutions. Jamie Rubin takes listeners behind the scenes for analysis, insight, and gossip with decision-makers and experts. From his wide-ranging experience on Wall Street, in City Hall, in Albany, and in Washington, D.C., Jamie knows how to ask the right people the toughest questions — on topics from housing to climate change to subway rats – and work with them in real time to identify solutions for NYC and beyond.
A Vital City audio project.
For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/.
22episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Trees: NYC"s Living Infrastructure
3d ago00:20:41Tap to summarizeNew York City just released its first-ever Urban Forest Plan — a legally mandated, decade-by-decade roadmap to get the city's tree canopy from 23% to 30% by 2040. Jamie talks with Adam Lubinsky, a partner at WXY Studio, who helped build the plan from the ground up. They cover why preserving old trees matters as much as planting new ones, why the only property type where canopy has been shrinking is one- and two-family homes, and why one-third of the city's urban forest sits on private land that nobody's currently watching. NYC Urban Forest Plan 2026 For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/
Transcribe →The LIRR and the Lost Art of the Labor Fight
2w ago00:29:15Tap to summarizeOn this episode of After Hours, Jamie talks to Fred Naiden — Columbia grad, former TWU Local 100 motorman, Harvard PhD, and recently retired UNC classics professor — about his new book, Railroaded: A Motorman's Story of the New York City Subway. Recorded the day after the Long Island Rail Road went on strike and settled, Jamie and Fred discuss the 1980 subway strike, what it was really like to walk off the job, why working conditions mattered more than wages, and how the city's transit world has changed since the days of 15,000 subway crimes a year. Fred also offers a pointed assessment of Mayor Mamdani — through the lens of someone who learned organizing from a communist rent-strike leader known only as "The General." Railroaded: A Motorman’s Story of the New York City Subway For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/
Transcribe →Lessons from Tokyo
4w ago00:43:55Tap to summarizeFor more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/ Joe McReynolds has two jobs. By day, he's a national security analyst tracking Chinese information warfare. Nights and weekends, he's a Tokyo obsessive with a PhD in progress, a private digital library of hundreds of Japanese-language urban studies books, and a story about the time he frantically called his boss to manufacture an emergency just so he could fly to Tokyo and show Ezra Klein around. Jamie sits down with McReynolds to talk about what New York could actually learn from a city where you can open a bar in your living room for $2,000, health inspections happen every five to seven years, and grandmas sell homemade lunchboxes off folding tables without anyone hassling them. Also: public toilets, the 1961 down-zoning that broke everything, and why Joe is terrified about the short term but quietly hopeful about geoengineering.
Transcribe →The Debt Gala: The Red Carpet for the People
May 100:10:52Tap to summarizeThe Met Gala, the largest fundraiser in America, raises money for the Costume Institute at the Met Museum, which pays a dollar a year in rent. Tom Costello thinks we can do better. Jamie sits down with the theater director and co-founder of the Debt Gala — a genuinely joyful alternative happening the night before fashion's biggest party — to talk about medical debt, the miracle math of buying it for pennies on the dollar, and why $19,000 can quietly erase nearly $2 million in someone's financial nightmare. https://www.debtgala.com/ For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/
Transcribe →The Cost of Freezing the Rent
Apr 2200:33:25Tap to summarizeFreezing the rent sounds simple. Alex Armlovich, one of the sharpest housing policy minds in the country, explains why it isn't — and why that doesn't mean it's wrong. Jamie and Alex, a fellow at the Niskanen Center and program officer at Coefficient Giving, dig into what the Rent Guidelines Board actually does, what happens to buildings when operating costs outpace revenue, and what a "physical equity extractor" is — and why you don't want one buying your building. For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/
Transcribe →The Honest City Budget
Apr 800:37:41Tap to summarizeJamie talks to Louisa Chafee, the head of the city's Independent Budget Office, about what it means when a mayor is honest about spending but bullish on income. The new administration delivered on its promise to provide fiscal transparency. But with a $6 billion gap projected for next year, growing to $11 billion by 2030, the question isn't just whether the math adds up. It's whether a property tax hike the City Council doesn't want and Wall Street revenues nobody can predict are really a plan. Along the way: class size mandates, nonprofit payment delays and public bathrooms. For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/
Transcribe →What's the Deal with SEQRA?
Mar 2500:39:09Tap to summarizeIn the latest episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin, Annemarie Gray of Open New York joins the podcast to discuss the growing momentum behind housing reform in New York. Fresh off a major victory in reforming the City Charter, Gray breaks down the push for State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) reform — a 50-year-old law originally designed to protect the environment that she argues is now being weaponized to block green, transit-oriented development. From the shifting political landscape under Mayor Zohran Mamdani to the "invisible" regulatory hurdles adding tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a single apartment, Gray explains why modernizing these rules is essential for an "all-of-the-above" approach to affordability. For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/.
Transcribe →Leaving City Hall: An Exit Interview with Molly Park
Mar 1100:38:02Tap to summarizeMolly Park spent 22 years as a New York City public servant — moving from the Independent Budget Office to HPD to the Department of Homeless Services, and finally to Commissioner of the Department of Social Services, one of the largest and most complex agencies in city government. She left on February 27th, 2026. In this exit interview, Jamie and Molly take stock of what DSS actually does (hint: it's a lot more than homelessness), what the federal assault on the social safety net means for millions of New Yorkers, and what it takes to manage a $16 billion agency serving 3 million people. She reflects on what she's proud of, what challenges lie ahead for the agency, and what she hopes to carry into whatever comes next. https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/system-coordination-in-crisis-response-to-high-acuity-homelessness/ City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/.
Transcribe →Governments That Get Results
Feb 1100:33:44Tap to summarizePolicymakers spend enormous energy debating what government should do. But who’s paying attention to whether it actually gets done? Gloria Gong runs Harvard’s Government Performance Lab, where she’s spent 11 years sending teams into more than 100 state and local agencies to work on that exact question. Gong explains why government defaults to process over outcomes, how a Detroit violence intervention program cracked the code on results-driven contracting, and why her lab mostly skips New York City — which she says has the best government talent bench in the country but makes a terrible model for everywhere else. She also tells the story of how her husband’s carefully maintained list of her passions saved her from a career in corporate law.For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/.
Transcribe →Reducing Crime by Improving Neighborhoods
Jan 2800:35:48Tap to summarizeOn this episode of After Hours, Jamie sits down with two architects of that history: Elizabeth Glazer, former head of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, and Renita Francois, former executive director of the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP).Together, they dive into the legacy of Neighborhood Stat — a model that treated safety not just as a matter for the police, but as a joint project involving sanitation, parks, and, most importantly, the residents themselves. As the Mamdani administration begins its work, Glazer and Francois offer a roadmap for "putting the public back in public safety" and a cautionary tale about why the data that drives these decisions must never be allowed to go dormant.https://map.cityofnewyork.us/neighborhood-stat/For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/.
Transcribe →