**New York City Mayor Appoints Cea Weaver as Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants Amid Controversy**
*By Cory Hawkins | 12:13 PM Wednesday, January 7, 2026*
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed 37-year-old Cea Weaver as the Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver, a Democratic socialist and housing activist, took on the role starting January 1st, named during Mamdani’s first news conference on his inaugural day in office.
However, Weaver has come under scrutiny for a past claim that home ownership is a “weapon of White supremacy,” a statement challenging the traditional American principles of private property rights, capitalism, and the American Dream.
The comment originated from an August 2019 post on X (formerly Twitter), though Weaver’s account has since been deactivated. A screenshot of the post, shared by the conservative X account “Libs of TikTok,” reads:
“Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
Additionally, another X account, @PNWConservative, shared a video of Weaver stating, “For centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good.”
Weaver’s perspective aligns with certain socialist thinkers who reference pre-industrial times or indigenous land-use models where “the commons”—shared lands for grazing or farming—were the norm. They see the historical shift toward individualized property ownership as an “enclosure” that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
In the undated video, Weaver expanded:
“In transitioning to treating it as a collective good and toward a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently, and it will mean that families, especially white families but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than we currently have.”
In an ironic twist, Weaver’s mother, Celia Applegate, reportedly owns a $1.6 million home just south of the main strip in Nashville, Tennessee.
Prior to her appointment, Weaver was a leader in organizations such as Housing Justice for All and New York State Tenant Bloc, according to a Facebook post from Mamdani’s office on January 2nd. She is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as is Mayor Mamdani.
While leading the New York State Tenant Bloc, Weaver helped pass the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, landmark legislation aimed at closing loopholes landlords used to raise rents and remove apartments from rent stabilization, according to Mamdani’s office.
Mayor Mamdani stated that Weaver will “work with us to hold landlords accountable and ensure New York City tenants are living in safe, clean homes.”
“For too long in our city, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it,” he said last week. “Our City Hall will change that.”
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