Backlash after Weaver’s appointment
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday defended his newly appointed housing official, Cea Weaver, amid backlash over years-old social media posts that resurfaced in recent days.
Mamdani last week tapped Weaver, a longtime tenant activist, to serve as executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. The mayor has said he wants to expand and empower the office to take “unprecedented” steps against negligent landlords.
Posts linked private property to white supremacy
Critics circulated Weaver’s since-deleted posts on social media, prompting condemnations from officials in the U.S. Department of Justice and from the editorial board of The Washington Post.
Among the messages were calls to treat private property as a “collective good” and to “impoverish the (asterisk)white(asterisk) middle class.” A tweet from 2017 described homeownership as “a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building public policy.’”
Mamdani avoids the substance, defends his record
Asked about the controversy on Wednesday, Mamdani did not address the substance of Weaver’s posts, focusing instead on defending her record of standing up for tenants across the city and state.
Eric Adams, the city’s former mayor and a fellow Democrat, said the remarks showed “extreme privilege and total detachment from reality.”
Weaver says some messages were ‘regretful’
Weaver said in an interview with a local TV station that some of the messages were “regretful” and “not something I would say today.”
She added that she wants “to make sure that everybody has a safe and affordable place to live, whether they rent or own,” adding that she is “laser-focused” on that goal in her new role.
Scrutiny in Mamdani’s early administration
The dispute over Weaver’s posts is emerging after Mamdani last month accepted the resignation of another official, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, following the Anti-Defamation League’s sharing of social media posts from more than a decade ago that featured antisemitic tropes.
Mamdani had said he was unaware of Da Costa’s messages, but Weaver’s past posts were known to the administration, according to a mayoral spokesperson, Dora Pekec.
Tenant protections and ‘public stewardship’
Weaver previously led the Housing Justice for All coalition, which was widely credited with helping convince state lawmakers to pass a sweeping package of tenant protections in 2019.
In the new role, Weaver is expected to play a key part in pushing a polarizing campaign pledge of Mamdani’s: identifying negligent landlords and forcing them to negotiate the sale of their properties to the city if they cannot pay fines for violations. The “public stewardship” proposal has drawn consternation from landlord groups and skepticism from others in city government.
In the early days of Mamdani’s administration, the mayor also signaled that he intends to act on that approach. In a press conference immediately following his inauguration last week, Mamdani said the city would take “precedent-setting” action against the owner of a Brooklyn apartment building that owed the city money and was in bankruptcy proceedings. He then announced Weaver’s appointment, drawing loud cheers from members of a tenants union gathered in the building’s lobby.
“It is going to be challenging,” Weaver acknowledged. “New York is home to some of the most valuable real estate in the world. Everything about New York politics is about that fact.”