Cea Weaver, a longtime tenant advocate, listens as Mayor Zohran Mamdani announces she will serve as director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.
Photo: Dave Sanders/New York Times/Redux
In one of his first official acts as mayor, Zohran Mamdani announced that he was reviving the Office to Protect Tenants and appointed Cea Weaver, a prominent tenants-rights advocate and member of his transition team as its new director.
But Weaver has come under fire in recent days after years-old social-media posts resurfaced, including a tweet in which the longtime tenants organizer called homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy.”
On Sunday, the New York Post reported on several tweets from Weaver’s now-defunct X account, highlighting a 2018 post that read, “Seize private property!” In another deleted tweet from 2019, Weaver wrote, “Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.” UnHerd has additionally reported on similar posts Weaver published on Facebook, including one from 2017: “If you don’t believe in the government’s sacred right to seize private property ITS OVER.”
Mamdani signaled Tuesday that he is standing by Weaver, citing her experience and past successes improving conditions for tenants. “We made the decision to have Cea Weaver serve as our executive director for the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants to build on the work that she has done to protect tenants across the city, and we were already seeing the results of that work,” he said Tuesday following an event.
But the unearthed posts have garnered attention across the city and nationwide. Former mayor Eric Adams, who has already made several pointed comments about his successor’s administration since leaving office, took aim at Weaver’s tweet about homeownership.
“Homeownership is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth despite every obstacle,” Adams said in a social-media post. “You have to be completely out of your f****ing mind to call that ‘white supremacy.’”
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, signaled the federal government was watching. “New York: Consider this your official notice from @TheJusticeDept,” she wrote on X. “We will NOT tolerate discrimination based on skin color. It is ILLEGAL. @CivilRights is paying very close attention.”
In an interview on Inside City Hall with Errol Louis Tuesday, Weaver addressed the controversy, calling her old social-media posts “regretful.”
“I think that some of those things are certainly not how I would say things today and are regretful. But I do think my decades of experience fighting for more affordable housing stands on its own,” Weaver said. “I’m proud to be in this role fighting for stronger tenants rights, and I think that, for many years, people have been locked out of the property market. That has produced a lot of systematic and racial inequalities in our system. And I want to make sure that everybody has a safe and affordable place to live, whether they rent or own, and that is something I am laser-focused on in this role.”
Before joining City Hall, Weaver served as executive director of New York State Tenant Bloc and was part of the organizing push for the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which instituted statewide changes to rent laws including limits on security deposits and additional eviction protections.
NYS Tenant Bloc issued a statement in defense of Weaver, suggesting the criticism ultimately stemmed from opposition to the new administration’s proposed housing policies. “The attacks on Cea Weaver — a proven tenant champion who’s beaten back the real-estate lobby again and again — are a desperate attempt to distract from the fact that we are in a new era for tenants in New York,” NYS Tenant Bloc communications director Ritti Singh said. “Real estate, MAGA, and Trump are working hand in hand because they know what’s coming: a rent freeze, real accountability for slumlords, and tenant power like they’ve never faced.”
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