Mayor Zohran Mamdani is turning to an administrator from outside the five boroughs to lead New York City’s sprawling social services agency amid near record-high homelessness, a deep shortage of affordable housing and an intense winter that has been deadly for homeless New Yorkers.
Mamdani is naming Erin Dalton as head of the city’s Department of Social Services, his office said Wednesday. She previously led the Allegheny County Department of Human Services in the Pittsburgh area.
Dalton declined to comment when contacted by Gothamist earlier this month about her potential appointment, but said in a statement Wednesday that she was grateful for the opportunity to push forward Mamdani’s “affordability and community safety agenda.”
“DSS can reduce the painful trade-offs families make between food and medicine, housing and safe childcare,” she said. “We can work to help the best public servants in the country deliver assistance more efficiently and with greater dignity. And we can work relentlessly so that all New Yorkers have access to better resources.”
The department is a crucial agency for millions of residents, including tens of thousands of people in homeless shelters and millions who receive cash, food or rental assistance. The agency includes the Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration, and employs more than 14,000 people, though hundreds of budgeted positions remain vacant.
Dalton previously oversaw a county human services department serving 200,000 residents — fewer than half the number of New Yorkers receiving cash assistance benefits.
The Department of Social Services oversees a shelter system now housing around 90,000 people a night through the city’s unique right-to-shelter rules. The department also oversees the city’s adult protective services and runs the nation’s largest municipal rental assistance program.
Erin Dalton
The New York Times first reported Dalton’s appointment on Wednesday.
She will replace outgoing commissioner Molly Wasow Park, who tendered her resignation earlier this month. Park is a 22-year government veteran who was appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams to run the agency in 2023 after serving as a top deputy in the city’s social services and housing departments.
Park pushed the agency to focus on housing more homeless people, open Safe Haven beds with fewer rules than traditional shelters and issue more housing vouchers than ever before. She is leaving her role at the end of this week, according to a spokesperson for the department.
Dalton will become commissioner as the Mamdani administration faces scrutiny over its homeless outreach policies and backlash from homeless rights advocates after resuming the dismantling of encampments and makeshift accommodations on city sidewalks and public spaces.
Mamdani said the Department of Homeless Services will decide when and where to conduct these “sweeps,” rather than the NYPD, which former Mayor Adams had put in charge of the strategy. Mamdani promised outreach workers would target those sites every day to encourage people to accept shelter or housing.
Mamdani initially vowed to stop encampment sweeps, in which police and sanitation workers remove people’s belongings in an effort to drive them out of public spaces. The mayor had argued the practice is ineffective because it rarely leads to long-term shelter or permanent housing for the people affected.
In September, Dalton touted her agency’s encampment “closure” efforts in an op-ed for the Pittsburgh Gazette. She said the city helped move 80% of the 250 people staying outdoors into shelters or long-term housing through continuous outreach.
Moving people from public spaces into shelters and housing “means treating people as neighbors in need, not criminals,” she wrote.
“The rhetoric coming out of our nation’s capital — equating homelessness with crime, suggesting we can arrest our way out of the problem — is not only misleading, it’s dangerous. It also shifts the focus away from solutions that actually work,” she added.
In New York City, Dalton will need to confront looming federal budget cuts from the Trump administration that could push thousands of New Yorkers off their food benefits in the coming months.
The agency issued food benefits to more than 1.7 million New Yorkers in December 2025, according to agency data.
This story has been updated with additional information.
