As Zohran Mamdani settles into office as New York City, more eyes are on his appointees.
That includes Cea Weaver, executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, who is facing backlash after 2019 tweets resurfaced showing her critical views on home ownership in the city, the New York Post reports.
“Private property, including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership, is a weapon of white supremacy,” Weaver wrote in the archived tweet.
“Homeownership is racist/failed public policy,” she wrote in a separate post, which allegedly called for a “collective” ownership and “shared equity” of property in the future.
Non-white homeowners in New York City, where Black residents make up around 33 percent of the city’s homeownership rate, objected to Weaver’s comments.
“White supremacy? I’m not white,” said Renee Gregory, president of Brownstoners of Bedford-Stuyvesant Inc., an organization founded in 1978 to help maintain representation of Black homeowners in the historically Black neighborhood.
“I read Weaver’s comments. I don’t know where they come from,” she added.
Black homeowners in Brooklyn, where brownstones often start around $1 million, are proudly celebrating their ability to own property in pricey NYC. Many feel Weaver—a middle-class white woman from Rochester, New York, who attended elite schools like Bryn Mawr and NYU—is out of touch on the issue.
“Homeownership is an essential element of Black wealth. It’s repugnant to attach yourself to policies that would look to devalue homeownership,” said Marlon Rice, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the 25th state Senate District in Brooklyn. “We should be fortifying pathways to homeownership.”
Philip Solomon, 51, who has owned a brownstone on Green Avenue in Bed-Stuy for 17 years, described Weaver’s remarks as “illogical.”
“I don’t want to believe that that’s what she intended to say,” Solomon said. “I grew up watching [The Cosby Show], and looking at a brown family on national network television. It gave me the idea that one day you can have a home in New York City. In a way, this is kind of like a dream realized.”
Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams blasted Weaver in a tweet, wondering
“completely out of your f–king mind.”“Homeownership is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth despite every obstacle,” Adams wrote.
Weaver, a veteran tenant rights advocate who previously led the New York State Tenant Bloc and helped pass the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act with Housing Justice for All, expressed regret for her past remarks but emphasized her continued focus on tenant rights—an issue affecting the vast majority of non-white New Yorkers who are renters.
“I think that some of those things are certainly not how I would say things today, and are regretful,” Weaver told NY1. “I do think my sort of decades of experience fighting for more affordable housing sort of stands on its own.”
Mamdani responded that “I made the decision to have her as our executive director of the mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, not because of her comments, but because of her work,” he said.
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