Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D., N.Y.) top housing official, Cea Weaver, openly declared plans to destroy property values in New York City during a May 2021 podcast appearance alongside her new boss.
"Our goal is to have the housing actually be worth less," Weaver said on the Bad Faith podcast, hosted by Briahna Joy Gray, a former press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) who was fired by the Hill after rolling her eyes at the sister of a hostage in Gaza who urged Gray to believe Israeli women whom Hamas had raped.
Weaver floated expanding rent control as a way to decrease the value of housing as an investment.
"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 a relatively unknown state assemblyman, offered his new housing czar effusive praise.
"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," he cooed.
Mamdani’s decision to tap Weaver as head of his Office to Protect Tenants has already resulted in scandal for his young administration. She denounced private property and homeownership as "weapon[s] of white supremacy" in a since-deleted 2019 post on X, and called to "impoverish the *white* middle class"—arguing that "homeownership is racist"—in other posts.
"I think the reality is, is that for centuries, we've really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good," Weaver said in a 2021 video. "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."
Weaver’s history of anti-white rhetoric has already drawn scrutiny from Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon, who said in an X post on Tuesday that her department "is paying very close attention."
Weaver herself is a child of privilege. Her father, University of Rochester professor Stewart A. Weaver, is a self-described "landlord" who owns multiple properties in Rochester, N.Y., property records show. Weaver’s mother, Celia Appleton, owns a $1.6 million property in Nashville. When reporters confronted Weaver about her mother’s homeownership, she burst into tears and ran away, the Daily Mail reported.
Before Weaver joined City Hall, she led Housing Justice for All, an openly communist nonprofit funded by billionaire George Soros.
"[E]lect more communists," she posted in December 2017. "Seize private property," she added in June 2018. The New York Young Communist League boasted about its partnership with Weaver to extend the state’s COVID-19 eviction moratorium in August 2021.
"Communist or not, @ceaweaver has been effectively working the power centers of Albany for years," wrote New York Times reporter Sally Goldenberg in April 2023.
Mamdani has so far stood by his longtime left-wing ally.
"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 told reporters this week.
Neither Mamdani nor Weaver responded to requests for comment.
