When Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City last month, he and senior aides quickly found fault with the operations of a key city agency, the Department of Social Services, which is responsible for homeless outreach and the distribution of public benefits.
Now, the commissioner of that department, Molly Wasow Park, has submitted her resignation, acknowledging on Monday that it did not appear that she would be retained by the new administration.
Mr. Mamdani’s team was already reconsidering the direction and leadership of the department even before 18 New Yorkers died after exposure to the elements during a recent period of extreme cold. Outreach to people sleeping on city streets is under the purview of the social services agency.
Ms. Park said in an interview on Monday that she had wanted to stay in her role, but that it “did not feel like it was going to materialize,” and she had decided her resignation would be “the right thing for everybody.” She said the past few weeks had been “immensely challenging.”
“When the final evaluation happens, I’m sure there’s going to be instances where we find instances where we could have done something different,” she said. “I feel like in an awful lot of cases, we did what we needed to.”
She said she was working with City Hall to determine when her last day would be. Her departure was first reported by the news site Gothamist.
According to two people familiar with the circumstances of her departure, Ms. Park decided to resign after being told she would not be retained.
One of those people and a third person, also granted anonymity to freely discuss a personnel matter, said the first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, had concerns with Ms. Park’s stewardship over an agency that he and the mayor felt was not adequately addressing the needs of an economically unstable population.
“We appreciate Commissioner Park’s years of service to the city and the mayor looks forward to working with her through this transitional period,” Mr. Mamdani’s spokeswoman, Dora Pekec, said in a statement, adding that City Hall would name a new commissioner “in the coming weeks.”
On Tuesday, Ms. Park will testify before the City Council about the weather-related deaths, the first of which occurred on Jan. 24. Since then, the city has been scrambling to bring people who are homeless to safety and warmth indoors.
The city said it had made more than 1,400 placements into shelters or other indoor sites, and had involuntarily removed some 34 people from the streets.
Ms. Park, a city government veteran who was appointed social services commissioner by former Mayor Eric Adams in 2023, said the difficulties over the past two weeks had not played a role in her decision to resign. She said she had not felt any pressure from City Hall to leave.
The cold snap was not Ms. Park’s first crisis. When she became commissioner, the city was struggling to find shelter space for thousands of migrants arriving every week, while also contending with lingering social and economic disruption from the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Ms. Park became commissioner after her predecessor, Gary Jenkins, resigned in 2023 over his handling of New York City’s homelessness crisis.
She said she had sought to make the social services agency more focused on housing, including by using rental vouchers to help finance affordable housing developments. And she said she hoped the city would continue to prioritize trying to understand why some homeless people avoid moving into shelters.
“We need to spend more time as a society asking what got people to this sense of trauma and dislocation, that they would rather stay on the street,” she said.
In response to the commissioner’s departure, Councilwoman Crystal Hudson, who represents a Brooklyn district and chairs the Council’s general welfare committee, described Ms. Park as “very responsive to the individual needs of my constituents and the broader needs of the most vulnerable New Yorkers,” as well as a “steadfast partner in the hard work of getting people off the streets and into permanent homes.”
Sally Goldenberg is a Times reporter covering New York City politics and government.
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