New York City’s new mayor is wasting no time showing voters exactly what they signed up for. Just days after Mayor Zohran Mamdani tapped Cea Weaver to serve as the city’s first-ever “tenant czar,” a trail of now-deleted social media posts resurfaced that reads less like housing advocacy and more like a Communist Manifesto reboot.
Weaver, now the director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, once urged followers to “Seize private property!” in a 2018 post. A year later, she went even further, declaring that “Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.” That is not edgy rhetoric taken out of context. That is a worldview, and it is one that treats the very idea of owning a home as morally suspect.
She also encouraged followers to “Elect more communists” in a 2017 post tied to the renaming of a Harlem street corner honoring former Rep. Vito Marcantonio, an open Communist. During the 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s death, Weaver posted that “The Police Are Just People The State Sanctions To Murder With Immunity.” These are not ancient college posts from a teenager. These are ideological statements from someone now running tenant policy for the largest city in the country.
NYC Mayor Mamdani's Tenant Director, Cea Weaver:
"We'll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good. Whites especially will be impacted." pic.twitter.com/RZSdCs8oEa
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 5, 2026
Weaver is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and previously worked with Housing Justice For All. She also helped shape Mamdani’s campaign and played a key role lobbying Albany Democrats to overhaul rent stabilization laws in 2019, squeezing landlords and expanding government control over housing.
Now Mamdani is racing ahead with a tenant-first agenda that includes freezing rents on roughly one million rent-regulated apartments and launching “Rental Ripoff” hearings across all five boroughs. Property owners are understandably alarmed. Humberto Lopes of the Gotham Housing Alliance summed it up bluntly, asking how housing is supposed to be built or maintained if landlords are treated like villains and the government is expected to do the job. Anyone who has seen the state of NYCHA knows how that experiment turns out.
Mamdani’s office has stayed silent on Weaver’s past comments, which is telling. Instead, he continues stacking his housing team with ideological allies, including the appointment of Dina Levy as commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development. Levy described herself as a longtime tenant advocate and promised to fight “head-on,” language that fits perfectly with the administration’s confrontational tone.
The bigger issue here is not one person’s old tweets. It is what those tweets reveal about the philosophy now guiding City Hall. When the official in charge of “protecting tenants” has publicly called for seizing private property and smeared homeownership as racist, reasonable people are right to ask whether this agenda is about fixing housing problems or dismantling the concept of private property altogether.
New Yorkers were promised reform. What they are getting looks a lot more like radicalism with a fresh coat of bureaucratic paint.