A conversation with Molly Wasow Park, former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Social Services (DSS)
April 28, 2026
The Housing Solutions Lab spoke with Molly Wasow Park, a Visiting Fellow at the Furman Center, to learn more about her experience serving as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Social Services (DSS) and the insights she gained into mounting an effective local response to homelessness. During our conversation, she detailed the challenges she faced while leading the agency during the pandemic and the unique housing lens she brought to the job.
Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We’re so thrilled to get to take advantage of your expertise while you’re here at NYU’s Furman Center as a Visiting Policy Fellow. Can you walk us through your career in city government and how you came to be Commissioner for DSS?
My city government career was, in a lot of ways, a very happy accident. I wanted to be in the affordable housing space and…ended up at the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) [where I was covering] housing and homelessness. It was intended to be a short-term stint leading to something in the not-for-profit space, but while I was there, I…had this epiphany, which in retrospect feels incredibly dumb, but that if you’re in government, you get a seat at the table, and you get to contribute to what the policies look like.
So I moved over from IBO to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD). I started in [HPD’s] Budget Office, [and soon] picked up Section 8, [then] performance management, [and] a variety of different things over the years.
I was very privileged to work for several commissioners who…recognized enthusiasm and talent, but also, very importantly, that your budget is a policy document. [If] you can’t pay for it, it doesn’t really matter how good your ideas are, [so] you want to have the person who knows the money sitting at the table making policy. I got to be in the middle of a lot of different things, which [was] exciting.
I [ultimately] moved over to the Department of Homeless Services (NYC DHS) because the one thing that the 84,000 people in shelter have in common is that they don’t have an affordable place to live. Fundamentally, homelessness is a housing issue. [However, it’s typically treated] as a human services issue. [Meanwhile,] housing is considered [an] economic development [issue].
NYC DHS has an enormous…real estate footprint. There are 500-something buildings being used as shelter at this point, but [NYC DHS did not] have anywhere close to the same kind of real estate sophistication that HPD did. At the same time, [New York City] had a really robust affordable housing sector, most of which knew little to nothing about homelessness. So, [I] was really interested in being the bridge there.
I made that move in the fall of 2019, and a few months later, COVID hit. I learned an awful lot about public health, [such as] standing up isolation programs, testing, and vaccination. Then [I] stepped up to the [role of] Department of Social Services Commissioner. DHS is one of the component agencies of DSS, so it was a fairly natural move.
Reflecting on your time as commissioner, what were some defining challenges you and your agency faced?
The COVID-19 pandemic
COVID was very significant on a worldwide level, but… in the homelessness context, we had thousands of individuals with…significant underlying conditions. In general, people experiencing homelessness are less healthy than people with housing. It’s both a cause and [an] effect. Furthermore, [these individuals were] living in congregate settings. The typical single adult shelter is dorms of six, eight, [or] 10.
Now, I personally was convinced that COVID was going to really decimate the system and be incredibly devastating for the people experiencing homelessness. There were plenty of tragedies, but the agency was able to move about 10,000 people into hotel rooms in 8 weeks. It was a huge operational effort. I think that saved a lot of lives. We also stood up testing programs and did our own vaccine program.
There was also a lot of anxiety about including people experiencing homelessness in [the city’s general pandemic infrastructure]. For example, in the city’s isolation hotels, our clients were screened out. So we had to set up parallel systems ourselves.
The asylum-seeker crisis and ongoing federal turmoil
We had about 4 months after COVID wound down before buses of asylum seekers started getting dropped off at our intake sites. I actually think the asylum seeker crisis was harder than COVID. COVID was an international crisis when everybody agreed business as usual couldn’t go forward. There were incredible amounts of disaster resources that were available.
With the asylum seeker influx, almost 250,000 people came through city systems in the space of about 2 years. [This was] an enormous strain on those systems. We were on calls with the Department of Homeland Security, and their answer was [that] once [asylum seekers are] paroled into the country, they’re not [the department’s] problem anymore. So there was not the same all-hands-on-deck approach.
There were weeks where [sic] NYC DHS opened five new hotels [to house asylum seekers]. [NYC DHS was] running sites with staff volunteering to work overtime. It was incredibly difficult. We brought the National Guard in to run shelters. If you told me I was going to do that, I would have told you you were insane, but we were incredibly glad to have the National Guard running shelters.
It did turn into an all-hands-on-deck city approach. Other agencies stepped up, we got through it. There [are] still many asylum seekers in this system, but we are back down to something that looks much more like business as usual.
[Now], you cannot underestimate the federal turmoil that is an ongoing crisis of its own. Setting aside what anybody thinks about particular policies, the ‘we’re going this direction, no, we’re going that direction,’ and ‘there’s a lawsuit, but there’s a stay, but maybe there’s not a stay, but it’s going to go to the Supreme Court, and then it’s all going to change,’…the level of uncertainty and chaos that has been created… is hard.
Underlying challenges
There are real challenges that…don’t fall in this historic, external-facing space. For more or less all of my tenure, there was a partial hiring freeze. There was a lot of political turmoil, with the mayor and the election. NIMBYism is [also] a huge issue in all things involving low-income people.
[Those challenges] are constant in government, [even if] they don’t match the historic nature of COVID or the asylum-seeker crisis…they are also really important and were big challenges to deal with.
"Focusing on the housing work was really important to me, and something that I made a priority in my time as commissioner. Homelessness is fundamentally a housing issue. That is the connecting thread between all of the different stories that brought people to shelters."
How did coming from a housing background influence your approach to the work of DSS and its role in preventing and responding to homelessness?
Focusing on the housing work was really important to me, and something that I made a priority in my time as commissioner. Homelessness is fundamentally a housing issue. That is the connecting thread between all of the different stories that brought people to shelters.
The agency was already doing a fair amount of housing work, administering voucher programs, doing the placement for supportive housing, various other things, but [did not identify as] a housing agency. So working on that was something that I put a lot of time into. Some of that was organizational, [such as creating] the first Chief Housing Officer, but [there was] also a lot of programmatic work. CityFHEPS is the city-funded rental assistance program. We more than doubled the size of the program during my tenure. There’s [sic] fiscal challenges with that, but it got a lot of people out of shelter. We were able to do that, despite an incredibly tight rental market.
We had a four-pronged plan that was looking at, how do we get vouchers — whether they’re CityFHEPS or others — into as many hands as possible? What are we doing [to increase] housing supply? How do we support the shelter operators and other partners so that their processes are working as well as possible? And [finally], how do we improve the processes within the agency?
Just to give a couple of examples, one of the things that the agency does before somebody can move into an apartment with a voucher is look at the administrative records, [such as building code] violations, the deed, other kinds of things like that. It used to be a completely manual process. It took easily a week or more to get through that administrative process.… so we automated it. I don’t want to say it was easy, but it was not that hard to set up something where it can be done…[in a] much more streamlined way. It took the process from… a week or more [down] to a day.
We took City FHEPs [and expanded it so it] can now be used anywhere in the state. [Even though] that’s not literally a housing supply response…it absolutely increases the supply that is available to clients. [We also made other] change[s] in policy. [For example], if you’re on cash assistance and going through the CityFHEPS process, you don’t have to redo your income certification. We’ll use the income that we have on file. It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but it took a lot of working through legal challenges.
We often talk about [whether] you believe in incremental change or [whether] you believe in large-scale change. I actually think it takes…incremental change to accomplish large things, and that’s really what we saw [with] CityFHEPS. It was a lot of little things that added up into [sic] a doubling of the program.
Based on your experience at DSS, what strategies can cities adopt to strengthen coordination with both current stakeholders in homeless services and groups that have traditionally not been involved in the space?
I absolutely think it’s really important to have open dialogue with a lot of different partners. The variety of partners, I think…is somewhat specific [to] what the local drivers are. [Bringing in] healthcare and institutional discharge planning is one [approach] that is widely understood. I absolutely think that education needs to be at the table. In New York City, 40 percent of the heads of households in the DHS family system don’t have a high school diploma. Those are families that are going to…need [long-term] public support, unless there are ways to…address some of those underlying issues. Workforce development systems also need to be at the table because…housing affordability is [not just] about how much the housing costs [but also] about how much people have to spend on the housing. I do think it is a space that needs a whole-of-government kind of approach.
I think it’s important that those driving the conversation [be] looking for win-wins, which means recognizing what’s important to the other systems. [For example, it’s making it clear to] hospital systems [that] people who don’t have a safe place to be discharged cost[s] [them] a lot of money…I do think once you can frame it as, ‘this isn’t something we need you to sort of contribute to on a charitable basis, but it’s actually good for everybody,’ that that helps.
The last thing I would say on this one is that it’s really important to be transparent about what a homeless services system can and cannot do. This is particularly true in New York City, where we do have a really robust shelter system, but there is very often an assumption that the shelter system can be all things to all people. Absolutely, wraparound social services are important, and DHS does very much believe in that, but A…people’s needs are really complex, and we’re not going to get every single thing that people could need on-site, and B, there’s [sic] actually reasons not to do it. You don’t want somebody’s access to mental health care, childcare, or employment services to be predicated on being in the shelter system.
You [want people to] understand what it is that the homeless services system can do really well. Because there’s so much NIMBYism around homelessness and homeless shelters, the tendency has been ‘let’s put our heads down, and maybe people will forget that we’re here.’ I actually think there’s a lot to be said for transparency.
"States and localities will have to be the problem solvers going forward, and I realize that's easier said than done."
What advice might you give to small and midsize cities eager to tackle homelessness but constrained by limited resources and capacity, especially in the current environment of federal funding and policy uncertainty?
I think it’s really important to recognize that the federal government isn’t coming. [This has] been true, frankly, before even this administration, and it’s certainly true now. States and localities will have to be the problem solvers going forward, and I realize that’s easier said than done.
Sort of the same point that I was making before about creating win-wins, if we can look at costs holistically, given all the systems that people experiencing homelessness can touch, I think there are ways to do more at the state and local level [with] savings.
I think local rental assistance vouchers are hard because they get very expensive very fast. We’ve certainly seen that [with] CityFHEPS. But, we created a project-based version of CityFHEPS, and I think that that might be the kind of model that smaller places could look at, because it’s very easy to control. [This is in opposition to] tenant-based [vouchers, where] you’re creating an entitlement that spins up really, really quickly.
I think [cities should spend time] inventorying what programs and tools already exist, and how they work together. In a lot of cases, the issue is less about what services exist than it is the connections between systems and the silos that break down. I think sometimes the investment that’s needed is less around creating new programs, but more about integrating and pathways through those programs.
The last thing I would say is recognize the scope of the problem. If there is not really a pathway to fully end homelessness in a given community, if the nature of the real estate market, the number of people who are rent-burdened, who are doubled up, who are working at poverty-level wages, right, if there is going to be continued ongoing housing instability…[cities should] invest in the systems to deal with that.
We have far too often said, ‘well, we’re gonna end homelessness in 5 years,’ and therefore we do really Band-Aid solutions for how we are going to manage homelessness, and then 5 years later, the wound is still there, and we put on another Band-Aid. If we acknowledge that, in fact, there are places where shelter is an important part of the infrastructure, and the shelter should be decent-quality real estate and have solid wraparound services, that’ll ultimately end up meaning that people spend less time in shelter and will have better outcomes.
Resources
Learn more about how cities can reduce homelessness and meet the needs of individuals and families experiencing homelessness. Watch a short webinar hosted by the Lab to understand how data can be harnessed to inform and improve homeless services.