Weaver, who has come under fire for previously blasting homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy,” dropped the eyebrow-raising remarks just months before Mamdani tapped her to be his new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants.
“Where I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, we saw this cycle where landlords and bankers and policymakers had driven up the value of real estate using speculative financial capital, the housing market crashed, and then the solution to that was just a different private equity firm coming in and owning the buildings,” Weaver, 37, said in a Dissent magazine interview published last winter.
“This cycle fueled waves of gentrification in Crown Heights.”
Weaver, a Rochester transplant, made zero acknowledgment of her own potential contributions to gentrifying the area where she rents.
The housing advocate attended Bryn Mawr College — a private college in Pennsylvania where tuition costs as much as $88,000 per year.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Weaver — who also went to NYU — attended the private school on a scholarship or paid her own way.
Her mom, meanwhile, owns a Nashville pad worth $1.6 million and is a professor at the prestigious Vanderbilt University, records show.
Details of Weaver’s upbringing were thrown into the spotlight after her appointment as Mamdani’s new woke renters’ rights honcho started ruffling feathers last week.
A spate of old social media posts quickly emerged in which Weaver, a longtime advocate who spent five years organizing the Crown Heights Tenant Union from 2010 through 2015, railed against gentrification.
“There is no such thing as a ‘good’ gentrifier, only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren’t,” Weaver wrote in a post from July 2018.
“Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,” she spouted in 2019.
Weaver, a proud Democratic Socialists of America member, has long advocated for her far-left stance on private property.
The office she will now head up for Mamdani is focused on protecting tenants against unsafe or horrible living conditions.
Weaver, a proud Democratic Socialists of America member, has long advocated for her far-left stance on private property.
Still, her past remarks have sparked a wave of outrage from Republicans and Democrats alike, including ex-Mayor Eric Adams, who ripped her prior position as a “total detachment from reality.”
Weaver, for her part, defended her record in light of the backlash — but acknowledged her regret over some of her previous remarks.
“I don’t think I’m out of my mind,” she said in a NY1 interview on Tuesday.
“You know, I think that some of those things are certainly not how I would, how I would say things today, and are regretful. But, you know, I do think my sort of decades of experience fighting for more affordable housing sort of stands on its own.”
Mamdani too stood by his controversial pick, telling reporters, “We made the decision to have Cea Weaver serve as our executive director for the mayor’s office to protect tenants.”
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