Longtime housing activist Cea Weaver, the new director of the Office to Protect Tenants, received a boost from Mamdani even as controversy engulfed his administration over her recently unearthed posts branding homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy” and declaring, “Seize private property.”
“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,” Mamdani told reporters following an unrelated news conference.
It came as Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, said on One America News Network that the feds were ready to “swoop in” to protect Big Apple residents in response to Weaver’s shocking views.
“They should be on notice, they’re on high scrutiny,” Dhillon of city government.
“We will NOT tolerate discrimination based on skin color,” she also said in a Tuesday social media post. “It is ILLEGAL. [DOJ Civil Rights is paying very close attention.”
Dhillon also said in an X post Monday that federal housing laws trump “any collective Marxist fantasies” while commenting on a March 2021 video of Weaver making more eyebrow-raising remarks.
In the clip, she said property should be transitioned toward a model of “shared equity” that would mean “families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are gonna have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”
Weaver has long advocated for her radical stance on private property.
“Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,” she spouted in 2019.
In a 2021 op-ed, she argued the state can “further de-commodify housing and land” by cancelling rents and shuttering eviction courts.
“And, as landlords exit the market, using state action to acquire properties and leverage disinvestment to convert thousands of homes into publicly and democratically controlled land/housing,” she wrote in the New Labor Forum. See video here.
