Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly appointed tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, was overcome with emotion Wednesday as she faced mounting scrutiny over her past remarks about homeownership and gentrification. According to the New York Post, the 37-year-old activist, long known for her outspoken progressive housing views, briefly appeared outside her Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment around 9 a.m. before retreating indoors after reporters questioned her about a $1.6 million property owned by her mother in Nashville, Tennessee.
Weaver, who now leads the city’s Office to Protect Tenants, drew attention after old social media posts resurfaced last week. In one 2018 post, Weaver wrote, “There is no such thing as a ‘good’ gentrifier, only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren’t,” according to The Post.
In a 2019 post, Weaver reportedly wrote, “Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.”
The resurfaced comments have prompted criticism, particularly in light of Weaver’s own experience living in the gentrifying neighborhood of Crown Heights.
In a 2023 interview with Dissent magazine, Weaver described the real estate dynamics that she said had reshaped her neighborhood. “Where I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, we saw this cycle where landlords and bankers and policymakers had driven up the value of real estate using speculative financial capital, the housing market crashed, and then the solution to that was just a different private equity firm coming in and owning the buildings,” Weaver said in an interview published last winter before joining Mamdani’s administration, according to The Post.
As criticism over her appointment grew, Weaver defended her record Tuesday in an appearance on NY1, saying her comments from the past no longer reflect her views.
“You know, I think that some of some of those things are certainly not how I would, how I would say things today, and are and are regretful,” she said. “But, you know, I do think my sort of decades of experience fighting for more affordable housing sort of stands on its own.”
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Weaver shared in a May 2021 Bad Faith podcast alongside Mamdani, “Our goal is to have the housing actually be worth less.”
“They need to be rent-controlled, and the reason why they need to be rent-controlled is not because, like, rent control is inherently socialist, but because rent control limits the speculative value of the land,” Weaver said.
Mamdani then praised Weaver stating, “I get most of my knowledge on housing from Cea, so if you get it from me, it’s just not coming from the source.”
In a 2021 video, the Free Beacon reports, Weaver said, “I think the reality is, is that for centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And we are going to—and transitioning to—treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently, and it will mean that families, especially white families, but some [families of color], who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to properties than the one that we currently have.”
