How an unexpected player in the fight for affordable housing is making a difference

New York City Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park wants to cement the department’s identity as a player in the housing world.

Doing so has been one of her key focuses since she was appointed to lead the massive department that oversees homeless services and the Human Resources Administration following Gary Jenkins’ resignation in February 2023. Park previously served as the first deputy commissioner in the city Department of Homeless Services, after 20 years of working in affordable housing and social services.

It’s been a challenging few years – more than 216,000 migrants have passed through New York since spring 2022 – roughly 60,000 of whom remain in city shelters – the vacancy rate for apartments dropped to a mere 1.4% and, more recently, questions have mounted about New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ ability to manage the city in wake of his indictment and other federal investigations surrounding his administration. Her department has scored a number of victories over the past year, including connecting a record-breaking number of New Yorkers to permanent housing and launching a program to create new affordable housing units for New Yorkers in the city’s shelter system.

City & State spoke with Park about placing homeless New Yorkers in permanent housing, tackling the city’s housing shortage, the ambitious City of Yes proposal and how the department’s work is marching forward amid the swirl of federal investigations surrounding the mayor and his administration. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Between the City of Yes housing plan, recent housing wins in Albany and the city’s own initiatives, it feels like there’s momentum in the city right now toward tackling the long-standing housing crisis. How has the department focused on housing over the past few years?

I grew up in the affordable housing space. I spent the bulk of my career at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. I came over to the Department of Homeless Services about five years ago, and I’ve been in this seat about 18 months. It has always really surprised me the extent to which the affordable housing and the homeless services sectors are siloed, even though the one thing that connects every single person experiencing homelessness is they don’t have affordable housing. That’s why part of my goal has really been to build bridges between the housing and the homeless services side, to house, and to really cement DSS’ identity as a player in the housing world.

We administer rental assistance for about 70,000 households at any given point in time. That makes us effectively one of the largest housing authorities in the country. We are really focusing on that housing work and we’re seeing that in the numbers.

Last year, we had a record-breaking year for exits from shelter into permanent housing. It was about 18,500 households – a 24% increase from the year prior. That’s really been a function of this very deliberate focus on how we are getting that done. We’re really moving into the housing development space as well. I have tremendous respect for the work that (the Department of Housing Preservation and Development) does – they are creating so much housing – but in a city with a 1.4% vacancy rate, we can’t wait. We have to think about other ways to develop housing. HPD’s mandate is to serve everybody from the lowest incomes all the way up through moderate and middle income New Yorkers. To make sure that we are creating a dedicated pipeline for our clients, we are stepping into that space.

How is your department stepping into the development space?

One of the things that we did this year is roll out our Affordable Housing Services program. CityFHEPS is our city-funded rental subsidy, and it’s a great program. You get a voucher, you find your unit, but that’s really hard with a 1.4% vacancy rate. The Affordable Housing Services contracts take that rental assistance, put it into a contract along with some operations funding and social service dollars. They’re 30-year contracts that are awarded to not-for-profit organizations, and with that contract, recipients can then secure private financing to acquire a building. We closed on four of those this summer.

There’s a couple of things that I’m really excited about from that – the buildings that closed on financing in July are fully leased up already, which is an unheard of turnaround time in the affordable housing space. Not only are these great opportunities for our clients, but they’re real time. The other thing that is really important and unique about the program is it fills a gap in the housing continuum. With most affordable housing, you know, it’s affordable – that’s really helpful – but right when you move in, you’re on your own. For many people, that’s all they need. Then the city also offers supportive housing, which is a deep service-rich environment for people with particular diagnoses who are experiencing chronic homelessness. There hasn’t traditionally been anything in between, but there are people who would benefit from it. The Affordable Housing Services program includes light touch social services on an ongoing basis. We’ve got a strong pipeline and we’re going to keep going.

Who will be participating in the program? Is it largely families or single adults?

It’s a mix. We’re doing both. The buildings that we financed over the summer were apartment buildings that have a range of unit sizes, so it’s going to be a mix of families and singles, which, that’s how a community is, and we like that. We’re also a part of the first, possibly only, hotel conversion. It’s the JFK Hilton project, which has a real alphabet soup of city agencies involved. DSS is also involved with one of these project-based rental assistance contracts to help make the overall project financially viable. There are going to be some family units there, but because it’s a hotel conversion, that one tilts a little more towards singles.

Are there any concrete plans to expand the program?

We’ve got about 900 units in the pipeline now, and we’re continuing to work with both the provider, development community and also the Office of Management and Budget to make sure that we can continue to grow the program.

You mentioned earlier that the city placed 18,500 formerly homeless households into subsidized permanent housing last year. Who are these New Yorkers? How was this accomplished?

There are a few asylum-seekers in that number, but some people have been in shelter for a very long time. One of the requirements for most supportive housing, for example, is that you’re experiencing chronic homelessness. For others, they’ve been able to move out of the system pretty quickly. One of the things we’ve done as an administration is lower some of the barriers to access CityFHEPS vouchers. When we came in, the adults in a family had to be working 30 hours a week to qualify. We reduced that to 10. They used to have to be in shelter for 90 days. You no longer have to do that. There’s a variety of other rule changes so it’s easier to use the vouchers.

Progress has come from a very deliberate four-pronged effort. It started with getting everybody a voucher. It’s not enough to just have a voucher, but it’s definitely a requirement in most cases. That is largely CityFHEPS, but we are also working with NYCHA on doing some Section 8 vouchering and a few other programs like that. The next prong is really thinking about housing supply. There are roughly 10,000 households still in shelter with a voucher who can’t find housing – the Affordable Housing Services program is a big part of tackling that, taking CityFHEPS statewide, improved coordination with the landlord community. The third prong has been focused on working with our not-for-profit partners and making sure that they have the tools that they need to both help find housing, but also submit a package that can get processed quickly. That has meant an enormous amount of training, rolling out some programs where we’re sending our staff out to better support shelters, using data in different ways so that we can spot problems earlier on, providing more support – really engaging there. The fourth piece is making sure that we are doing our work as well as we possibly can. We have rolled out new technology for voucher processing. We have reduced the number of documents that we’re requiring. We have improved how we look at violation records and other kinds of administrative records to decide if a unit is OK for someone to move into.

Our success is a function of all four of these strategies working together. If we had focused only on getting people vouchered or only on improving our internal processes, we wouldn’t be moving the needle.

While the Department of Social Services hasn’t necessarily been directly involved in crafting the City of Yes housing plan, its potential upcoming passage by the City Council is consequential given so much of the department’s work is necessitated by the city’s housing shortage. How do you feel about the proposal and what impacts might it have?

I think it’s so smart and innovative. I really commend the Department of City Planning (and Department of Housing Preservation and Development) for all the work they put into it and I really hope that we do see its passage. It’s incredibly important for what we do. Going back to the roughly 10,000 households with housing subsidies, they are able to pay the rent, but there isn’t a unit available. So if we don’t think creatively about every single possible avenue we can use to create more housing, we’re never going to really, truly move the needle. We have to have more supply. Certainly not every unit created as a result of City of Yes is going to be a deeply affordable unit that is immediately affordable to one of my clients, but by growing the supply overall, by increasing the universe of places where people can use vouchers, by making the city more flexible, at the end of the day it’s going to really be incredibly important even for very low-income New Yorkers.

Much of the news coverage over the past couple of weeks has centered on the unfolding federal investigations, the indictment of Mayor Eric Adams, the string of high-profile administrative departures. What does all this mean for city operations and the daily delivery of services? Has it been a distraction for your department? How are you leading the department through this period?

For somebody who doesn’t have a place to sleep, or who can’t feed their kids, that’s the emergency. They don’t really care that the mayor was indicted. We are focused on making sure that we are delivering the best services that we can for New Yorkers. This is something I’ve certainly thought a lot about. For me as a leader, I’m not on the front lines of processing benefits right or managing shelter intake, but it matters to the team that they know that there is consistency and stability. I think it is important that I continue to provide that and to support them as they provide these services that can literally be life or death for New Yorkers.

Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom is phenomenal. She oversees our agency. We are incredibly lucky to have her as our deputy mayor, and she has helped navigate anything that has come up. I am also so thrilled by the news that Maria Torres-Springer has been promoted to first deputy mayor. I worked for her as HPD commissioner. She’s just a phenomenal leader. It is certainly an unusual moment in time, but we are concentrated on getting the work done because people need us.

Me, the first deputy for DSS and then the two agency administrators – between us we have something like 75 years worth of government. We were here and we are going to be here.