After Hours with Jamie Rubin: A Vital City Podcast

In the summer of 2022, families in New York City were waiting six hours in the heat to swim for one hour. Julie Sandorf, who ran the Charles Revson Foundation for nearly two decades, decided to find out why — and what she found was a lifeguard program that had been controlled by a single union official for nearly fifty years, accountable to no one, operating under certification requirements that e...

New York might be next in a growing line of states adopting millionaire taxes — and the same old fear comes with it: tax the rich too hard and they'll leave, taking their businesses and their tax revenue with them. Cristobal Young, an economic sociologist at Cornell, has spent over twenty years testing that fear against actual IRS data, going back to New Jersey's first millionaire tax fight in 200...

New 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 W X Y architecture + urban design, 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 cano...

On 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 wal...

For 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...

The 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 f...

Freezing 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 e...

Jamie 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 ta...

In 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 n...

Molly 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: i...

Policymakers 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 intervent...

On 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...

Grand visions win elections, but functional governance is what keeps a city running. In this season premiere of "After Hours,"Jamie Rubin and Vital City founder Liz Glazer dig into a pragmatic to-do list for the new Mamdani administration: 11 tangible fixes for the first 100 days,  the first installment of Vital City's new "Just Fix It" project . They discuss why unsexy improvements — like dismant...

This week on After Hours, Jamie takes a detour from New York politics to explore a deeply personal piece of the city's basketball history: the life and legacy of Michael Ray Richardson, the electrifying Knicks guard whose career was derailed by cocaine addiction in the 1980s. Jamie sits down with writer Jake Uitti, who co-authored Richardson's autobiography Banned: How I Squandered an All-Star NBA...

Jamie and Leila Bozorg, Executive Director For Housing and Secretary of the Charter Review Commission, analyze the ballot measure results: what it all means for building new housing stock in New York, why New Yorkers voted against "number six," and how these ballot measures will help Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani fulfill his affordable housing dreams. For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban lif...

As we gear up for the mayoral election, Bill Lipton, the former Lead Organizer and Organizing Director of The Working Families Party, shares how the party in its early days defied the status quo, how he and his team learned to make effective change by working across party lines and how politicians at every level of government -- even the new mayor -- can prioritize affordability AND climate politi...

In 2019 the storied violence at Riker's Island was on its way to being a thing of the past. Fast forward to today: not only is the jail still in full swing, but the violence, mismanagement and deaths at Rikers are perhaps worse than ever. The mayoral election is just two weeks away, and both Cuomo and Mamdani have shared their vision for the future of Rikers. Jamie talks to Liz Glazer, founder of...

This year's mayoral election has the potential to fix the housing crisis in New York City. Of course, there are the candidates themselves, but more importantly, there are the ballot questions. Four out of the six questions, which were carefully written by The Charter Revision Commission,  aim to make housing more affordable and accessible throughout the entire city. Jamie sits down with Leila Bozo...

For the past few weeks, rumors have surrounded Mayor Eric Adams and his potential resignation. Is he going to leave office early? Will he work for the Trump administration? Can his voter base really keep Mamdani from becoming the mayor of New York? Jamie and award-winning journalist and Executive Director of Citizens Union Grace Rauh pick apart these rumors and examine what this race says about th...

Almost everyone agrees that New York City needs more housing — and that building housing here takes too long and costs too much. New York Magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson wants to remind us that one thing we shouldn't cut corners on is good design. Jamie and Justin talk about what architects really mean when they say “design,” and how good design and abundant housing are closely relate...

As debates rage on over how to make housing production cheaper, Cara Eckholm — formerly of Sidewalk Labs, modular growth company Nabr, and Cornell Tech — has her eyes on modular. Cara, who now runs the urban consultancy Eckholm Studios, sits down with Jamie to discuss what New York should do to — and what pitfalls we should avoid — to build good homes faster. For more solutions-oriented thinking o...

In this episode, Jamie reflects on Trump’s Reconciliation Package – a.k.a. the “Big Beautiful Bill” – and, drawing on his expertise in climate policy and investment, predicts how the bill could pit the clean energy industry against America’s poor and working-class citizens. For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at  https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/ .

You couldn't have missed it — on Tuesday, June 25, state assembly member Zohran Mamdani won the New York primary, beating favored contender and former governor Andrew Cuomo by 12 points. Everyone and their mother has an explanation for what happened and what a Mamdani mayoral administration would look like. But none have quite the perspective of Bradley Tusk, political strategist and founder of Tu...

A lot goes wrong in New York, and as New York City deputy mayor for operations from 2021-2025, Meera Joshi was responsible for fixing much of it. During her tenure during the Adams administration, Meera led nine agencies that cover all facets of New York City life — from trash to street cleaning to buildings. In this episode, she and Jamie go under the hood of what it looks like to manage an opera...

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser and Yale Law School state and local government law professor David Schleicher don’t always agree when it comes to New York politics, but on this mayoral election they do: among the 11 candidates in the crowded field, they insist, most aren’t saying much of anything. Jamie, Ed and David run down this cycle’s policy platforms — the most overplayed, the worst, and, somewh...