New York’s New Social Services Boss And the Thicket of Problems She Confronts
Urban Matters: Professor Main, Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently named Erin Dalton as commissioner of the Department of Social Services – the largest local social services agency in the nation, with homeless services and administering income supports in its portfolio. These are subjects you’ve researched extensively, including for your recent book Reforming Social Services in New York City.
Street homelessness is a high-profile problem, one that the severe winter underscored. It’s also one where Dalton enjoyed some success while directing social services in Alleghany County, (Pittsburgh) Pennsylvania. What should New Yorkers hope she’ll accomplish?
Thomas J. Main: Let’s start by going back to a 2010 article in Criminology & Public Policy that evaluated a police campaign to ‘clean up’ homeless encampments on Los Angeles’s skid row. It found that crime was reduced in that area and was not displaced to other neighborhoods. But the reduction was modest and it turned out that much of the crime in the area was not driven by the encampments. Moreover, the campaign made no effort to move homeless people into housing.
I’d venture to say that interventions led by social service workers primarily, rather than by police, and that focus on offering people housing can be effective. They should use a Housing First strategy, in which rapid placement in permanent housing is offered without any strings attached. The Trump administration and its supporters have been calling for an end to Housing First and more aggressive policing as a way of addressing street homelessness. That approach defies the best research on what works to get people off the street.
UM: The subtitle of your book is “How Major Change Happens in Urban Welfare Policies.” The book’s thesis is that, conventional wisdom notwithstanding, big agencies aren’t doomed to institutional inertia. So: what factors permit big human services reforms, and are they present in New York today?
Main: My book identifies cogent policy ideas, backed up with overwhelming, rigorously developed evidence, as the main factors precipitating big reforms in New York City’s social service bureaucracy.
The main example was the rise of work-oriented welfare reform in the 1990s. It was driven by a very impressive research base showing that mandating welfare clients to work got more people working than did education and training programs. When mandates were implemented nationwide, work rates among welfare clients went up, the welfare rolls went down, and poverty did not increase. [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani and his Human Resources Administration Commissioner Jason Turner implemented this strategy in New York and accomplished a radical transformation of the city’s welfare bureaucracy.
I believe this ‘big idea’ strategy could be used to accomplish progressive goals. But what is the big welfare policy idea backed up with plenty of evidence that progressives could deploy? I don’t see one on the horizon right now.
UM: So, is everything old new again? Work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid included in the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act [OBBBA} indicate the City must once again create some kind of work program for recipients. Can lessons be learned from the 1990s-era welfare reforms?
Main: The work-oriented welfare policies of the 1990s were supported by a great deal of rigorous evaluations. That’s why they caught on and had a positive impact. The SNAP and Medicaid work requirements being pushed by the Trump administration have no such evidence base behind them. Bureaucratic disentitlement is not my idea of good government.
Welfare work requirements developed in the 90s should be retained. And the search for ways to place welfare clients in steady jobs should continue. Steve Banks [the DSS commissioner under Mayor Bill de Blasio] contributed to that search when he implemented Career Pathways work programs. They didn’t have as much impact as could be wished for, but they were on the right track.
I am in favor of people getting access to the benefits they are legally entitled to without hassle. But once people are engaged with the welfare system that is an opportunity to help them develop their human capital.
UM: Delays in processing applications for SNAP and other benefits have seemingly become chronic post-Covid era problems at DSS. Won’t the more stringent reapplications required by OBBBA make this worse?
Main: Let me say something about the welfare proposals of the Trump administration that include the attack on Housing First and the tougher SNAP reapplication process.
Housing First is another example of a policy that was widely implemented and had positive results because it was supported by plenty of rigorous evaluations showing it worked better than other policies in terms of getting street dwellers placed in permanent housing. In trying to end Housing First, Trump is rejecting the whole process of evidence-based policy making that has led to a much-improved welfare system. And given that since the 1990s the overall trend in the welfare rolls has been down, I don’t think that discouraging people from reapplying for SNAP is called for.
I’ve got two ideas for welfare reforms that I think are better than Trump’s. States now have wide discretion in what they do with federal funds intended to be spent on the TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] welfare program. A 2024 GAO [US Government Accountability Office] report found considerable state misuse of those funds. In one state, TANF funds paid for “inflated payroll expenses, including for nonexistent personnel, and inflated invoices with false mileage information…real estate, resort vacations, and cosmetic surgery, among other things.” If more stringent requirements to prevent fraud are wanted, how about imposing them on the states?
Also, spending on TANF is now frozen at an amount set at the program’s creation in 1996. Why should that determine what we spend on TANF now? Trump’s welfare policy proposals just assume and reinforce decisions made more than a quarter century ago and are now in need of rethinking.
UM: Your research covers more than 50 years of social services policy in New York. Drawing on that, what advice would you give Commissioner Dalton on maximizing the impact she can have?
Main: Instead of striving for dramatic, non-incremental change, Dalton could focus on getting her department to do a kinder, gentler, and, most importantly, better job at what is it is already doing. More effective outreach to the street homeless on a Housing First basis and better operation of HRA’s service provision and work promotion programs would be quite an accomplishment. That is essentially what Steve Banks did as DSS commissioner. A lot of positive, incremental change would be quite an accomplishment.
Thomas J. Main, a professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, is the author of Reforming Social Services in New York City, published by Cornell University Press.
Photo by: Alberto Rojas