Molly Wasow Park, the commissioner of New York City's Department of Social Services, resigned this week after learning she would not be retained by Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration. The departure — barely a month into Mamdani's tenure — signals that the new mayor's team has wasted little time finding fault with the agency tasked with managing the city's sprawling homelessness and social welfare apparatus.
Park acknowledged her exit on Monday, telling reporters the role she had hoped to keep simply wasn't going to materialize. Two people familiar with the circumstances confirmed she was told she would not be retained. A third anonymous source corroborated the account.
The timing is notable. Eighteen New Yorkers have died after exposure to the elements during a recent stretch of extreme cold, with the first death occurring on January 24. Park is still scheduled to testify before the City Council about those deaths — even as she packs her desk.
Mamdani and his senior aides had already begun reconsidering the direction and leadership of the Department of Social Services before the cold-weather deaths made headlines, the New York Times reported. First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan reportedly shared concerns about Park's stewardship, with the mayor's team concluding the agency was not adequately addressing the needs of what they described as an "economically unstable population."
That phrase does a lot of heavy lifting without saying much. New York City's homelessness problem is not new, not mysterious, and not the result of insufficient bureaucratic compassion. The city has spent billions on shelter systems, transitional housing, and social programs. The question isn't whether officials care enough. It's whether the machinery they've built actually works.
Park herself seemed to acknowledge the limits of what her agency accomplished. In an interview, she offered this:
"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. I feel like in an awful lot of cases, we did what we needed to."
That's the kind of self-assessment that sounds reasonable in a conference room and hollow on a sidewalk where someone froze to death.
Park was appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams in 2023, replacing Gary Jenkins, who resigned that same year over his handling of the city's homelessness situation. She inherited a department already buckling — at the time, the city was scrambling to shelter thousands of migrants arriving every week while still dealing with the economic and social wreckage of pandemic-era policies.
Now she's gone too, and the pattern is unmistakable. New York cycles through social services commissioners the way other cities cycle through school superintendents: a new face, a new set of promises, the same intractable problems, and an eventual resignation that gets framed as a mutual decision.
Mayor Mamdani's spokeswoman, Dora Pekec, issued the requisite diplomatic statement:
"We appreciate Commissioner Park's years of service to the city and the mayor looks forward to working with her through this transitional period."
City Hall added it would name a replacement "in the coming weeks."
Since the cold snap began, the city says it made more than 1,400 placements into shelters or other indoor sites and involuntarily removed 34 people from the streets. Those numbers tell two stories at once.
On one hand, 1,400 placements suggest the system was working at scale to get people indoors. On the other hand, 18 people still died. And the involuntary removal of just 34 people — out of a homeless population that numbers in the tens of thousands — raises an obvious question about whether the city's legal and political framework even allows officials to act decisively when lives are at stake.
Park, for her part, suggested the city should spend more time understanding why homeless individuals refuse shelter in the first place:
"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."
It's a sentiment that sounds compassionate. It's also the kind of open-ended inquiry that can justify inaction indefinitely. At some point, the question stops being "why won't they come inside?" and starts being "why won't the city bring them inside?" New York's progressive establishment has spent years insisting that individual autonomy — even the autonomy to freeze — trumps intervention. The 18 dead are the cost of that philosophy.
The deeper story here isn't one commissioner's departure. It's what Mamdani intends to do differently — and whether his instincts will run toward more of the same.
Park had pushed to use rental vouchers to help finance affordable housing developments, a policy direction that sounds innovative until you consider that New York has layered voucher program upon voucher program for decades without solving the underlying housing crisis. The city doesn't have a voucher shortage. It has a housing supply problem driven by zoning restrictions, regulatory burdens, and construction costs that make affordable development nearly impossible without massive public subsidy.
If Mamdani's team forced Park out because they want a commissioner who will pursue even more aggressive progressive interventions — more spending, more programs, more studies about "trauma and dislocation" — then the revolving door will keep spinning. The next commissioner will inherit the same broken system, face the same structural constraints, and eventually sit for the same exit interview.
Councilwoman Crystal Hudson, who chairs the Council's general welfare committee, praised Park as a partner in the work of getting people off the streets:
"[A] steadfast partner in the hard work of getting people off the streets and into permanent homes."
Steadfast, perhaps. But 18 people are dead, a commissioner is out, and the agency is leaderless heading into what remains of winter.
Park insisted the cold-snap deaths played no role in her decision to leave, and that she felt no pressure from City Hall. The anonymous sources tell a different story — that she was effectively told her time was up. Both versions may contain partial truth, but only one matters: the person responsible for the city's social services safety net during the deadliest cold stretch in recent memory is walking away, and no one in city government is willing to say plainly why.
That's the real failure. Not one commissioner's tenure, but a political culture where accountability gets laundered through anonymous sources and polite statements about "transitional periods." Eighteen New Yorkers froze. Someone should have to own that sentence out loud.
Instead, New York gets what it always gets — a new name on the door and the quiet expectation that next winter will somehow be different.
