Zohran Mamdani’s woke, privileged tenant advocate Cea Weaver breaks down crying when asked about hypocritical gentrification comments
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly instated radical-left tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, broke down Wednesday as she dodged questions from reporters about her gentrification hypocrisy.
The 37-year-old, who has faced backlash for blasting homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” in the past, teared up when she emerged briefly from her apartment building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at about 9 a.m.
Weaver, who was tapped by Mamdani to be his new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants, quickly ran back inside after she was asked about the $1.6 million home her mother owns in Nashville, Tennessee.
“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 2018 post.
“Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,” she said in a 2019 post.
Weaver once whined, too, about gentrification in her own Crown Heights neighborhood — despite being a middle class white woman who attended Bryn Mawr College and NYU.
“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 told Dissent magazine in an interview published last winter prior to her joining Mamdani’s administration.
“This cycle fueled waves of gentrification in Crown Heights.”
Weaver, who spent five years organizing the Crown Heights Tenant Union from 2010 through 2015, stopped short of acknowledging her own potential contributions to gentrifying the area.
Her mom, meanwhile, owns a Nashville house worth $1.6 million, records show.
As the backlash against her appointment continued to mount, Weaver defended her record but acknowledged she did have some regret over her past 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 some of those things are certainly not how I would, how I would say things today, and are 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.”
Interest in Mamdani’s hire kicked off after some of her old social media posts — in which the Rochester transplant railed against gentrification — resurfaced last week.
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