Podcast: A Challenger for the Council
Tune into Vital City's latest podcast, in which Maya Kornberg discusses her run for city council.
After Hours with Jamie Rubin: A Vital City Podcast | May 7, 2025
City Council candidate Maya Kornberg, running in a district that's been represented by Bill de Blasio, Brad Lander and now Shahana Hanif, discusses her race — and what she thinks connects it to larger local and national trends. She argues that many constituents feel unheard — a problem she says she would address through mobile district offices and continuous engagement. She also argues that today's divisive political climate, while troubling, isn't unprecedented for American democracy.
You can listen to this episode, "A Challenger for the Council," on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Jamie: You are listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City Podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin. So on this episode, we're gonna try something a little different. We decided to zoom out from the citywide politics and policy issues that we've usually talked about and into local and hyperlocal politics and policy. Almost everybody pays more attention to what's happening at the highest levels of government. What's really happening in the neighborhoods often tells you a lot more about where the city really is, what's working and what's not, and what people really care about than, for example, the mayoral race does, particularly right now when it's still, believe it or not, quite early in the mayoral race.
So I wanted to take a look at one particular city council race to see how the citywide issues that we already are familiar with interact with the hyperlocal issues, and to see if the candidates who are running for city council in that district are focused on the same basic issues that plague the city, or if it’s a totally different set of issues that are very, very local. And most people wouldn't recognize 'em unless they lived within a 10 block radius of the district. So to talk about this, I invited Maya Kornberg to come on the show. Maya is running for City Council in District 39. She had spent a lot of time studying how legislative bodies work both here and abroad. She's a senior fellow and manager at the Brennan Center for Justice, where she works on issues like combating political violence, making voting more accessible, and making government work more effectively, all of which will come in handy if she is actually elected to the City Council.
Her district, District 39, covers large areas of Brooklyn, including Park Slope, Carroll Gardens and Gowanus. It very much runs the economic spectrum, which makes it a really interesting microcosm of New York City issues across the board. And I wanted to talk to Maya because she's not a professional politician, at least not at this stage, but she decided that she wanted to actually make something better in the city and the world at large, and she thought she could best do that by running for local offices. She actually got up and decided to do it. And as we discovered from this conversation, she's learning a lot about what it means to run, to actually represent individuals who live around you. And to think about what it's going to be like to be in a legislative body when you've been studying one for your entire career. I should note that we also invited her opponent to join us, and she declined. So here's my conversation with Maya Kornberg.
…
