After Hours with Jamie Rubin: A Vital City Podcast

Making the Shade

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 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 [https://report.urbanforestplan.nyc/NYC-Urban-Forest-Plan-2026.pdf] For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/

The LIRR and the Lost Art of the Labor Fight

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 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 [https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/railroaded/9781978844094]   For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/

Lessons from Tokyo

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 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.

The Debt Gala: The Red Carpet for the People

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 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/

The Cost of Freezing the Rent

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 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/