New York recently released its first-ever Urban Forest Plan. Now comes the hard part.
Trees are infrastructure. They cool streets during heat waves, soak up stormwater, clean the air and, as most New Yorkers know, make neighborhoods better places to live. But that infrastructure is unevenly distributed: economically underprivileged areas have roughly 19% canopy coverage, while wealthier areas reach 26%. In this episode of "After Hours with Jamie Rubin," Jamie talks with Adam Lubinsky, a partner at WXY Studio and one of the architects of New York's first-ever Urban Forest Plan, about how the city intends to grow its canopy from about 23% to 30% by 2040 — by preserving the trees it has, planting many more in the right places and turning New Yorkers into stewards of the 7 million trees already here. As always, can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Jamie: You are listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin.
Jamie: When most New Yorkers think about the city's infrastructure, they think about subways, roads, bridges, maybe the sewer system. They almost surely don't think about the trees that surround them. But trees shape life in New York City in ways that are very easy to overlook. They're living, breathing infrastructure that cools the city during heat waves, improves air quality, absorbs stormwater, and of course makes streets more pleasant to walk down and neighborhoods nicer to live in — unless you happen to live near one of those horrible ginkgo trees.
Jamie: In April, New York City released its first-ever Urban Forest Plan, a roadmap to increase tree canopy across the five boroughs from around 23% of the city's acreage today to 30% by 2040. While that may not sound like a big shift, if you take into account how geographically enormous the city is, it's a very ambitious goal. I sat down with Adam Lubinsky, a partner at WXY Studio, who worked, along with many others, to bring this plan to life. We talked about how the city can get to 30% tree coverage by preserving the current canopy, planting still more trees, and engaging New Yorkers as stewards of the existing urban forest.
Jamie: The conversation, like everything else in New York City, isn't just about the trees. It turned out to be a lot about climate adaptation, environmental justice, and public health — and above all, it's about who this city really exists for. It's about who gets shade, who doesn't, and what kind of city we're building for the people who are going to live here for the decades to come.
Jamie: Adam, thank you for being here.
Adam: Great to be here.
Jamie: Before we get into the project you worked on, tell me briefly what it is that you do.
Adam: I'm a principal at a firm called WXY, based here in New York City.
Jamie: If I were a young person looking for a job and my last name started with a Z, I would come straight to your place — I figure I'd have a clear shot to the top. They need a Z. So, WXY — what kind of firm is it?
Adam: We're an architecture, planning, and urban design firm focused on not just buildings or plans, but really the public life of New York City. We spend a lot of time working with city agencies and community-based organizations on what it takes to make New York a dynamic, equitable, and healthy city. The Urban Forest Plan is exactly the kind of project we love to dig into — thinking about city systems, what it takes to change things on the ground, and how to put that into action.
Jamie: What's your favorite project you've worked on?
Adam: We just helped the city launch its program to set up ADUs — accessory dwelling units — in people's backyards. It's been really fascinating to think through not just how to show people what they can do with their backyard space, but how to make sure they understand the zoning, how to budget for it, where it's permitted. We've also been working on affordable housing in the Bronx — a project called The Peninsula, which is being built on the site of the old Spofford Juvenile Detention Center. That's going to become 800 units of affordable housing, plus workspace and open space.
Jamie: Excellent. So let's turn to your most recent project: the Urban Forest Plan. How did it come to be?
Adam: Its origins go back to 2023, when the city released its PlaNYC update — the periodic citywide climate plan. In that plan, the city set out an ambition to reach 30% forest canopy across all five boroughs. That was backed up by Local Law 148, which the City Council passed, mandating that an urban forest plan be produced every 10 years laying out how to get there. So we produced the inaugural Urban Forest Plan for New York City.
Jamie: And when was the final report released?
Adam: It was released during Earth Week — late April of this year.
Jamie: And where would someone find it, if they wanted to read it — as I have?
Adam: It's on the city's website, under the Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice.
Jamie: We'll post a link in our show notes. Now, people my age remember Bette Midler and the Bloomberg administration's MillionTreesNYC campaign. This plan is something quite different — more organized, coordinated, strategic, goal-oriented. What were the goals beyond city beautification?
Adam: MillionTreesNYC was a huge and important effort. But one of the clear realizations coming out of it was that it wasn't just about putting new trees in the ground — it required a much more in-depth strategy. At the highest level, our goals were threefold: preserving the tree canopy we already have, planting significantly more trees and thinking carefully about where and how, and stewarding the urban forest by pulling in people at every level — education, community engagement, care over the full life of a tree.
Jamie: We're at about 23% covered now, is that right?
Adam: We're at 23.4%, as of 2021, based on LiDAR data — planes that flew over the city and produced laser mapping of the entire canopy. Our goal is to reach 30% by 2040.
Jamie: Do you know how many acres the city covers in total?
Adam: We have about 45,000 acres of urban forest right now. Multiply that by just over four and you get the total acreage of New York City.
Jamie: How much of that 45,000 acres is in actual parks versus the broader urban landscape?
Adam: Parks manages almost 50% of our urban canopy — just over half of that is within parks themselves, and just under half is on streets and other areas that Parks is responsible for. Parks is by far the biggest player in all of this.
Jamie: So if I walk across the Great Lawn in Central Park — does that count as canopy?
Adam: No. Canopy refers specifically to the area covered from above by trees. The Great Lawn is green space, but it's not canopy. That's not to devalue it — but trees bring a whole different set of benefits.
Jamie: And those benefits go well beyond what most people think about. Cooling is one that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention — until recently, when you start seeing those brutal heat waves. We have literal shade deserts in this city.
Adam: Absolutely. Carbon storage is a huge one. Stormwater filtration — trees absorb runoff and keep pollutants out of our waterways. Biodiversity, especially for pollinators. And then there are the less obvious ones: measurable reductions in stress, which in turn have real health benefits — reduced rates of cardiac disease, stroke, asthma, and improvements in physical fitness. The full picture of what we get from urban canopy is really remarkable.
Jamie: And where else would the raccoons live?
Adam: Exactly. I see them quite a bit, actually.
Jamie: The only thing scarier to me than the raccoons are the beavers — but that's a different podcast. One more thing on the numbers: you were saying two-thirds of the canopy is on public property and one-third on private?
Adam: That's right. And one of the things the plan tries to do is reach all the different stakeholders and property owners responsible for different parts of the urban forest — not just Parks, but NYCHA, state and federal landholders, private campuses, cemeteries, and the backyards and front yards of one- and two-family homes.
Jamie: How do you go about incentivizing the private sector? And what do you do about other government agencies that have no particular expertise in canopy management and no dedicated funding for it? My obligatory example is NYCHA — a ton of green space, amazing that it's stayed green at all.
Adam: NYCHA has about 1,000 acres of canopy and no full-time staff dedicated to their trees. There are a lot of volunteer friends groups doing stewarding work, which is valuable. But one of the plan's recommendations is to explore having Parks take on responsibility for the care of canopy on NYCHA campuses. We went through the data very carefully — I don't think anyone has mapped it this precisely before — and divided the canopy by ownership type, looking at what's on NYCHA, what's federal or state, what's on private campuses and cemeteries, what's in backyards. That granularity lets us target recommendations to the right stakeholders. For some parcels the answer is a transfer to Parks. For private owners, it starts with guidance — helping people understand that the tree they think they need to take down for safety reasons might actually be manageable with some expert advice.
Jamie: You can certainly incentivize ground-up developers to plant. But what about developers who encounter existing trees on a site they've already been permitted to build on?
Adam: That's the harder question. New York doesn't have what several other cities have — tree protection ordinances. Washington, D.C., for example, has long-standing statutes protecting trees. Figuring out how to put something like that in place here is complicated given the current pressure on housing supply. The plan does include a recommendation to work through what that could look like — whether it's a contribution to a dedicated tree fund, a replanting requirement, or something else. It's on the table.
Jamie: So as of now, a developer who has a building permit doesn't need any additional permission to remove trees on the site?
Adam: That's right. That's one of the complexities. We also look at how HPD can play a role, particularly around affordable housing development. There are a number of areas where the plan says: we need to take a deeper look.
Jamie: Let's talk about the demographics of the canopy. Where is it distributed — and where isn't it?
Adam: The citywide average is 23.4%. Environmental justice areas are at 19%. Non-EJ areas are at 26%. Roughly 40% of the city's land area falls into environmental justice categories, so you can see clearly that canopy is less abundant where it's most needed. The most direct path to improving that is through the public realm — streets, sidewalks, parks. At the borough level, Brooklyn used to have the least canopy in the city. Over the last 20 years it's essentially pulled even with Queens, both sitting just over 19%. And if you look by property type, the only category where canopy has actually been declining is one- and two-family homes.
Jamie: Any intuition about why?
Adam: We don't have complete data on that. But some of it is concern about trees falling on homes — climate change is affecting soil conditions and storm intensity in ways that make people feel more exposed. It's a range of factors. But increasing canopy on those properties is a significant opportunity.
Jamie: You'd think homeowners who are solely responsible for their own grounds would feel more stewardship instinct. But I guess if they decide the tree has to come down, there's nobody stopping them.
Adam: I think it largely comes down to a set of concerns about trees. And it's worth noting that in places like Staten Island, one- and two-family neighborhoods still have substantial coverage. It's really about where canopy is expanding versus contracting, and making sure we're addressing both.
Jamie: I can't let you go without asking about specific tree species. The trees in my neighborhood with the little pods that fall and smell absolutely terrible — those are ginkgos, right?
Adam: Yes, that would be the ginkgo.
Jamie: Why are they here, and how do we replace them?
Adam: I'm not the best person to make the case against the ginkgo — I actually have what I believe is one of the tallest ginkgo trees in New York City right behind my house. I'd estimate it at 70 to 80 feet. But I will say the city is actively looking at diversifying the tree palette, including toward species with broader canopy coverage. The most common tree in New York's parks and on its streets right now is the London plane tree. A couple of previously common species are no longer being planted at all — Norway maples and Callery pears are both out, partly due to climate concerns. There's a real repositioning underway in how we think about street trees and park trees, to make sure they're hardy enough for a changing climate, native where possible, and optimized for canopy and biodiversity.
Jamie: I'm not afraid to say I hate the ginkgo tree. The ginkgo fan club can send me all the hate mail they want. What city should we be aspiring to in terms of canopy percentage?
Adam: It's a great question. I lived in London for a while, and you'd think of it as a green city — but London is actually at 21% canopy, below us. So we're already ahead of London. I think one way to frame the aspiration is getting to one tree per person. We have about seven million trees right now. Getting our count up so every New Yorker can claim a tree — that would be something.
Jamie: We tend to think of this as a climate problem, an environmental problem, an aesthetic problem. But it's a government problem first and foremost. None of this happens if the city doesn't decide to play a role it largely hasn't played before, outside of Parks.
Adam: Making sure we have the right leadership structure in place is critical. The Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice will be the agency lead. And every other city agency will have a designated canopy steward — someone who may have another primary role, but who is clearly responsible for trees within their agency. That kind of coordination is essential to actually pulling this off. There are a lot of different nuts we're trying to crack. I'm trying to use as many tree metaphors as possible.
Jamie: Ginkgo nuts.
Adam: Getting into the weeds.
Jamie: It's a great report. The work is spectacular, and I know it took a year and a half. The nice thing is that it was started under Mayor Adams and announced under Mayor Mamdani — and the new administration is clearly taking it seriously. Adam, thank you for being here. We'll look forward to hearing how it goes.
Adam: Great to be here. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Jamie: Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.
