Just days into his new position as New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani is receiving some scrutiny online for his new director of the Office to Protect Tenants.
Mamdani spent much of his campaign promising to ease the financial burden of living in New York City, especially in regard to the cost of rent. The first three executive orders of his mayoral term focus on these promises.
But these promised changes cannot occur “unless you have a proven, principled and tireless fighter at the helm,” he announced last Thursday. “That is why I am proud to announce my friend, Cea Weaver, as the director of the newly reinvigorated mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.”
“Cea has a fearless record of standing up for tenants in our city,” Mamdani said.
Weaver also has a digital record that paints her as anti-private ownership, causing property owners to worry about what her policies might look like.
One property owner from Brooklyn, Humberto Lopes, has expressed concern on TikTok over how Mamdani’s housing policies will hurt property owners and landlords. “I understand you want everything free,” Lopes said in one video. “But who pays for free (stuff)? The working person.”
Kenny Burgos, the head of the New York Apartment Association, also opposed Mamdani’s housing intervention. Rent freezes end up degrading housing quality for tenants, while increasing rent across the broader market, he said.
Burgos cited a report from Columbia Business School, which found that freezing rent for four years “would guarantee that the average building in the Bronx would fail, even if rent increases resumed in 2030.”
As he concluded his piece, he appeared to brace himself for Mamdani’s incoming housing policies. “Renters should be prepared for the consequences,” he wrote.
New York City’s new housing director is capturing attention online
Weaver is currently the executive director of Housing Justice for All and New York State Tenant Bloc, and she’s been involved in the city’s tenant advocacy scene for a decade and a half.
In an undated video on X with more than 6 million views, Weaver said she would like to transition property to a “collective good” rather than having individual ownership.
“I think the reality is that, for centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good,” Weaver said. “And we are going to transition into treating it as a collective good and toward the model of shared equity.”
This kind of transition “will require that we think about it differently,” she continued. “It will mean that families, especially white families but also some POC (people of color) families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”
Similar anti-private-ownership sentiments emerged on her X account, which had been deactivated as of Monday afternoon.
In an X post from August 2019, Weaver said, “Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
In two other posts from 2018, Weaver equated ownership with white supremacy and racism.
In July that year, 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.” Several months later she added, “Impoverish the ‘white’ middle class. Homeownership is racist / failed public policy.”
Weaver says activists should use public spaces as ‘sites of resistance’
During Mamdani’s campaign, Weaver appeared on a panel discussion sponsored by Verso, which describes itself as “the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world,” and said public schools and tenant associations should be “sites of resistance” to President Donald Trump’s deportation and policing agenda.
“If ICE and the National Guard are coming to New York City ... we really have to use our tenant associations and our parent-teacher associations and our public schools as like networks of defense around Zohran’s agenda and in support of our neighbors,” Weaver said.
She added, “We should really look to what Brandon Johnson (Chicago’s mayor) and as well as the Chicago’s teacher’s union is doing to really use the schools and the city as sites of resistance against the federal incursion.”