Cea Weaver’s anti-white statements have already drawn scrutiny from the Justice Department
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D., N.Y.) top housing official, Cea Weaver, bemoaned “white, middle-class homeowners” during a 2021 podcast appearance. Her goal as an organizer, Weaver said, is to “undermine the institution of homeownership.”
“White, middle-class homeowners are a huge problem for a renter justice movement,” Weaver said in previously unreported remarks on the Bad Faith podcast in September 2021, 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. Also on the podcast was activist Arianna Afeni Evans, most famous in the D.C. area for being arrested at a metro station for fare evasion in 2025.
“Unless we can undermine the institution of homeownership and seek to provide stability in other ways, I don’t know—it’s a really difficult organizing situation we find ourselves in.”
During the podcast episode, Weaver laid out a plan to use the government to attack landlords and prevent them from evicting tenants, in addition to fighting against homeownership.
“We need a national movement to pass universal rent control to limit landlords’ ability to endlessly profit on our homes, to give tenants the right to form a tenants’ union where they live, and to really block evictions,” she said. “But rent control is not enough: People need money. We need to tax billionaires and transform that into cash assistance for renters. And we need to chip away at homeownership, and that means—that means Medicare for All, that means, like, a deep investment in real social service programs.”
She also seemingly argued that landlords do not have a legitimate claim of ownership of their properties.
“You know, if you piss off your landlord, you could be forced out, and something that really pisses off your landlord is not paying rent for a year and a half because you can’t,” she said. “Landlords really don’t like the idea that a tenant could live, that a tenant could be able and allowed to stay in something that they consider themselves to own.”
The revelation of Weaver’s 2021 remarks comes amid fallout from her long history of anti-white and radical leftist views. She said on a different episode of the Bad Faith podcast—alongside her current boss—that her “goal is to have the housing actually be worth less.” Mamdani then stated that he gets “most of [his] knowledge on housing from Cea.”
Weaver 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.
Her past bigotry has already drawn scrutiny from the Department of Justice, with Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon, warning in an X post on Jan. 6 that her department “is paying very close attention.”
Weaver, a democratic socialist and close Mamdani confidante, has long positioned herself as an enemy of private property and home-ownership.
“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.”
Before she joined City Hall, she spent years as executive director of Housing Justice For All, an openly communist group 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.
Mamdani, for his part, has stood by Weaver.
“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 after some of Weaver’s past comments first emerged.
Neither Mamdani nor Weaver responded to requests for comment.
