A Challenger for the Council

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.

Jamie: Maya, thanks for being with us. 

Maya: Thanks for having me. 

Jamie: So what inspired you to get involved in this race? 

Maya: I've spent my whole career defending democracy. When Trump was elected, which was shortly after my son was born, it became clearer to me than ever before that the local government is going to be our best line of defense in protecting democracy and in guarding funding for things like healthcare and education and transportation that the administration is attacking. And in continuing to fight for the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community and seniors and immigrants. I think that that's gonna matter more than ever before here in New York City Council.

Jamie: Certainly, I agree fully with the notion that that local is where a lot of this is gonna happen. But the district was represented already, obviously, by a Democrat who was not termed out — Shahana Hanif. What prompted you to go ahead and challenge her? 

Maya: I think that what matters now is uniting people in this moment as Democrats and standing up against Trump. And what I hear across the district is that a lot of folks don't feel listened to. To me, listening to people, meeting them where they are, even if they disagree with you — that is the ABCs of good government. I've spent my whole career studying what good government is. Good government is listening to people, and I think we can do better at that here in District 39. And that's a big reason for running. 

Jamie: Aside from your willingness to fight and represent the district generally, where would you say is the biggest point of difference in terms of policy between you and the incumbent? 

Maya: In terms of specific policy issues, we do not necessarily see eye to eye in our approach to safety. My opponent has consistently called to defund the police. I have done work on how to keep elections and elected officials safe, and I do not believe that defunding the police is going to make us safer. I do believe in police reform. I do believe that our criminal justice system is broken in many ways and in need of fixing. I think we have to be investing in more deescalation and anti-racism training for NYPD officers and fostering more positive interactions. I think we need to be pushing to close Rikers Island, pushing to eliminate unnecessary court fees, to have crisis intervention first responders continue to invest in programs like the Brooklyn Mental Health Court and other restorative justice practices. I think we need to do all of this, but taking a stance like defunding the police completely is just not going to, in my mind, make us safer. 

Jamie: Got it. You know John Della Volpe? He's the Harvard Pollster. 

Maya: Okay. 

Jamie: He's at the Kennedy School. He does these annual national youth surveys. He did a bunch of work in New York City recently and he has basically the same principles you do, which are that everything is about listening.

Maya: You know, we can't do surveys and all that stuff if we're not out in the field listening to the voters. It's interesting you mentioned that he worked with youth. One of the jobs that I had was during the pandemic. I worked for the United Nations and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which is a union for all the parliaments in the world, running a project that showed how legislatures around the world were engaging with citizens during the pandemic. I led a team that did this. We looked at 180 legislatures around the world, and one of the things we looked at was youth engagement. And frequently what we heard, and we actually did a focus group and talked to young people also about how they felt listened to around the world. One of the things that we found was that often, especially with youth, they feel tokenized, and sometimes the engagement is genuinely window dressing. I'm very passionate about teaching young people how much their voice matters and to think critically and to get involved in the parliaments and the legislatures that are doing that well, or the legislatures that are actually engaging. But what I found internationally in this project, and I see this actually here, running locally, is that oftentimes when you ask parliamentarians around the world, “What is super frustrating to you when you engage with citizens?” — which is what we asked in some of these focus groups — they'll say, “People come to me with issues that are just not my issue.” Like, they're not national legislative issues. They want their trash dealt with, whether it's Egypt or New York City. People get confused as to who to contact about that, and then it breaks down trust. In the national government when they say, well, I contacted this national legislator and they didn't fix my composting issue, and so if we taught civics better, they would know who to contact. 

Jamie: Oh, interesting. So it's a failure of civics understanding that gets into the wrong place.

Maya: Exactly. There's a misunderstanding of where to go, how to get there. And one of the things I'm super passionate about is reinvigorating civic engagement here locally in a way that meets people where they are. I've talked a lot about doing things like a mobile district office. It's not rocket science, but it makes a big difference to have a continuously open district office, which I should mention the incumbent did not have here. But also to have a table that you just set up. You could have it in a library if it's cold outside, you can have it in a park if the weather is nice, and move it around the district to different parts of the district and say, “Come to me with your issues.” I'm meeting you where you are. I'm not gonna assume that you know where to find me. 

Jamie: John Della Volpe, who I talked about earlier — he wrote a really interesting Substack a few months ago, right after the election, about what the Democratic Party could do to reinvigorate itself. And one of his suggestions was that they take on local volunteerism. The Democratic Party should be known as the National Party that sends people to help you wherever you are with whatever. 

Maya: Yeah, I think people see it if you help them with something tangible, and they care if you come and listen to them and help them deal with their issue. 

Jamie: It seems ridiculously intuitive, 

Maya: But the Democrats have failed at showing people that they're there and that they're listening. I think that is why we lost the national election. 

Jamie: Yeah, that seems to be part of the reason. But back to your election. The reason I brought [John Della Volpe] up was the following. He did 20 focus groups or so all over the city, and then did a 2,000-plus person public survey. Very, very, very detailed. What he really came out with was from across the city, the shared issues that were top of mind for different geographic and different affiliation groups, from super liberal to progressive —

Maya: Like ideological differences.

Jamie: Yes, exactly. Not surprisingly, there were probably four issues that were the highest in everybody's minds. Before I tell you what those were, tell me what, if you had to say what the four issues on your listening to tours, what are you hearing from your would-be constituents? 

Maya: One of the things I hear about every day and I experience myself is the affordability crisis that we're facing. You know, for me, I'm a renter in this district. I work at a nonprofit. My husband is a teacher. We have a six month old baby. I genuinely don't know how we can afford to stay here long-term with the current crisis. So one of the things that I'm really committed to doing is addressing the childcare affordability crisis that we're facing, pushing to fully fund 3-K to implement universal 2-K. The other issue that I would say matters a lot to folks — and of course I've spent a lot of time thinking about it in what I've shared — is our democracy. People care about the state of this country. They tell me how afraid they are, but I keep saying this is the time to engage. The other issue that I would say I hear about from folks is safety. I conceptualize safety as including climate safety. People are afraid that we don't have the flooding infrastructure that we need and that we're not implementing the green infrastructure plan that the city has. And we have to make sure that we have bike lanes and that we're protecting congestion pricing, and that we have safe streets. And of course we have to make sure that at a time of rising hatred, we are working to keep the community safe, that we are working to implement restorative justice practices like crisis first responders, and that we are working to foster dialogue with local law enforcement.

Jamie: Okay. So I would say you got most of the issues. 

Maya: What did I miss? 

Jamie: Housing was the number one across, if you take everybody. Housing basically ranked number one and it wasn't even all that close. 

Maya: I'm not surprised. 

Jamie: Mm-hmm. And then public safety. You know, crime. Even though you can argue with people until the cows come home that you know about how safe the city is, if people have that perception, they have the perception. Yeah. And then — but it doesn't sound like it was as much of an issue for your folks —

Maya: — but plenty of folks say to me, “I don't feel safe on the subway,” and I hear them. I commute by Subway too, to go to work, and I get that. That's part of why I think we have to be addressing some of the mental health crises that we see affecting the subway with crisis first responders. I think that's very much a part of people's sense of safety. 

Jamie: And that was what the third one is. It was interesting, the mental health, it all sort of lumps into disorder is what we were calling it. And a lot of it is, so, you're exactly right. A lot of it is subway related; that's where people seem to encounter the most issues. So let's say you win, you're in the city council now. Guess what? You get to live it out. You've got 50 colleagues, so you show up every day. It's gonna be fantastic. You're gonna love every single one of them. What's your view about how that institution works and maybe could be reformed? 

Maya: There are two really important things that I plan to do when I start, that I have seen successful legislators at all levels of government do. Number One, and I know I keep coming back to this, is having as many conversations as you can. You're not going to push forward any kind of legislation if you don't have any relationships. So I think building those relationships across the ideological spectrum, even if folks don't agree with you, having as many meetings as possible is the way to do it. The second thing that I think is the marker of the most successful legislators is to hire capable staff. Staff are the backbone of the legislative process, and hiring staff who have been in the council, which I have not worked in. Those are seemingly trivial, but I think crucial things. 

Jamie: You're always best if you get your best staff. Okay, quick lightning round: term limits. City council term limits — good or bad? 

Maya: I think that term limits are good in that we have too many ways to keep people out of politics. I think term limits exist to say, “Okay, we're gonna try to open up the process.” But I do think that we need to think long and hard about what term limits look like and about how they can actually be used as a tool to bring people in.

Jamie: Okay, so on balance, I'm gonna say pro for city council term limits. Maya: I think in the council we should have term limits. 

Jamie: I think I agree. I was a skeptic, but having watched it play out over a bunch of years, it has refreshed the quality of the people. There's not a lot of old “stick-in-the-muds.” Next lightning round question: member deference. So, land use, big land use projects in your district. Typically members get deference if they don't like it. 

Maya: I would respect member deference. I know that it is a norm. But, you know, if I felt that it was not doing what it was meant to do, then of course I would be thoughtful, again, about doing what I think should be the number one priority, which is to be listening to the local community voices and doing what's in their best interest. 

Jamie: Okay. What about your own member deference? So there's a project in your community, it's a 10-story building. The community is up in arms, the five blocks around are all upset. And even though it's gone through, it's done everything that needs to be done, they’re going to call you and they're like, “Councilwoman, we voted for you for this. You gotta block it.”

Maya: I think that in the hypothetical that you just explained, the priority for me would be making sure that the folks locally feel that they've been listened to. I mean, I started out by saying this earlier with a lot of people who don't feel seen and heard here in District 39. I think that holding many different town halls will allow me to be fully immersed in what the community wants and be able to really fight to bring the best result for the community. That is my number one priority. And as I said at the outset, building more affordable housing is a number one issue right now for a lot of folks, including myself, with the affordability crisis. And so that to me is the center. The member deference is a manifestation of that larger issue.

Jamie: Okay. All right. Fair enough. I'll tell you — I don’t know if this is advice or just observation — but having been around this stuff for a long time and working for the governor for a long time, the hardest thing to do is to tell people what they don't want to hear. 

Maya: That's not just in government.

Jamie: Absolutely. But here, they happen to be your boss in effect, and you're up every two years. So your best weapon is probably to establish a track record of being somebody who actually goes out and listens and responds and does something. And then when you have to deliver bad news, you can say, look, I heard it, you know that I'm here and this is just gonna be a tough one, and I will fight for you every time. But this is one where, you know, it is what it is. 

Maya: I couldn't agree more. And I think that the thing that makes people feel least heard, and we see this locally, I've seen this in a lot of the work that I have done, is when you come and you say, “I'm here to listen to you. Let's have a community listening session,” and then everyone tells you what they think and then you never come back to them. You never come back to them and say anything. Then they feel the least listened to. I think that the most important thing is to have a continuous engagement process. Sometimes that means being the bearer of bad news. And of course, folks could disagree with me, folks already do. And that's okay. I think sitting with discomfort and sitting with disagreement is something that I'm quite well-versed in, even if I have not held elected office before. 

Jamie: Okay, final question. Let's just step back, pull back and talk about something national and even long-term. Obviously it's a very unusual time, to say the least. There is a sense of whatever it is — fear, despair, confusion. Everybody's sort of got their heads spinning. There is a real concern that this is effectively the end of history, which is, you know, we thought it was the end of history before it was not. This may be. As somebody who has studied all the relevant areas for a while, what's your view about where we are in history, and what the prospects are for getting the ship back on track? 

Maya: I could obviously talk forever about this, but just to give a general sense, I am somewhat — I don't know if contrarian is the right word — but I wrote a whole book on Congress that wasn't about how everything is only broken and everything is only bad and there's no hope. When folks talk about Congress, that's what they frequently write about. I think that our institutions are malleable, and I think they are shaped and reshaped by the people who are there making them. I think we see this in the council. I think we see this in the New York State legislature. I think we see this in Congress. That is why it is all the more important to elect people who represent us and to be continuing to engage. The other thing that I think is that a lot of the scary currents that we're seeing here under Trump are not new. I taught a course — I'm not teaching it right now, but I've taught it a few times — about American political development in different ways. I show students how a lot of the racism and the misogyny and the xenophobia and the brokenness is baked into our institutions in different ways, and it is not new. It's really scary what's going on with anti-immigrant sentiment, for example. But, you know, folks, remember: Just about a hundred years ago, the 1924 immigration law was horrifying and it limited immigration from whole parts of the world for several decades. The ways in which we are trying to control women's bodies and control sexuality — that is not new. We can trace that back to the puritanical roots of this country. We can look at the Comstock Act that Trump is trying to resurrect now, which banned mailing obscene materials and was targeted at immigrant communities. It was targeted at communities of color. These are not new forces, and I think that we can learn from history. We've been here before. We have fixed things before. We have fought back before, and I think we're just in another one of those moments. I don't think this is unprecedented. 

Jamie: Interesting. I agree, but boy, it can be hard to convince people of that. Some of it is young people who just have never had this.

Maya: I think some folks have just not lived through it. And you know, I'll say I'm a millennial and what I experienced in my generation was like, we came of age when Barack Obama was president, and those were eight really critical years of our lifetime. And then when Trump was elected, I think that there was a real shock among folks in my age group. There's a lot of things that I keep pointing out to folks that are, you know, similar to Richard Nixon in the ‘70s; the post-Watergate election was when we elected one of the largest freshmen groups ever elected to Congress. What I will say is that I don't think that everything has been seen before. I think that the way in which big money is controlling politics right now after Citizens United and the way in which we see Elon Musk, who is an unelected person, an extremely wealthy person having disproportionate power is really scary, and I don't think we've seen it to that extent.

Jamie I agree with that. I think the assumption is that he controls them. It may be that you can sort of see it now as people are quickly understanding what he's doing to the economy; it may be that he finds out that it does to some extent. It goes both ways when you are relying solely on people's self-interest. When their self-interest erodes, you can quickly find out that they aren't any more friendly to you than you are to them. 

Maya: Well, I think that the problem of money and politics is broader than Trump, so I think that we just have to fight it. 

Jamie: Maya, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time to run and thank you for taking the time to talk to us. 

Maya: Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun to chat.

Jamie: Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.