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\n Photo: Kara McCurdy\/Mayoral Photography Office\n <\/p>\n
Cea Weaver is still adjusting. For one, there is calling Zohran Mamdani \u201cthe mayor\u201d instead of his first name. \u201cI just messed up,\u201d the director of the Mayor\u2019s Office to Protect Tenants says after dropping a stray \u201cZohran\u201d on the first night we meet. It is also weird to have two phones. We are seated at little desks in a classroom at a Queens high school and she shows me her work phone\u2019s backdrop, which is a photo of Mamdani, not out of professional devotion but so she can tell the otherwise identical devices apart by having her boss\u2019s face looking back at her when she picks one up. Then there\u2019s getting dressed, especially for events like the one she\u2019s about to headline, the second in a series of Rental Ripoff Hearings the administration has organized to hear tenant grievances across the five boroughs: \u201cI am spending so much money on the RealReal.\u201d Tonight, Weaver is wearing a cropped black jacket and gray slacks \u2014 a hint of twee in the floral socks peeking out from her mary-jane heels.<\/p>\n
While Weaver, who is 37, is comfortable enough facing the public \u2014 she was a housing organizer and minor celebrity<\/a> of the New York left prior to joining the administration \u2014 she is not used to this kind of visibility. Or scrutiny. During her first week in office, the New York Post picked up old deleted tweets of hers that advocated for \u201cseizing private property\u201d and called homeownership a \u201cweapon of white supremacy.\u201d A circus erupted: Post reporters camped out in front of her Brooklyn apartment and published<\/a> photos of her crying on the street under a headline calling her a \u201cWoke, Privileged, Tenant Advocate.\u201d (\u201cThat\u2019s not how I would say things today,\u201d she said<\/a> of the tweets.) Since January, she\u2019s been the subject of op-eds<\/a> in The Wall Street Journal suggesting she will turn the city into Venezuela and think pieces<\/a> in The Atlantic painting her as an extremist. The Daily Mail called her<\/a> \u201canti-white\u201d and a \u201chypocrite\u201d (the latter accusation because her mother owns a craftsman-style home in Tennessee). \u201cIt was at a level of intensity that was new,\u201d she says of the coverage.<\/p>\n Photo: Kara McCurdy\/Mayoral Photography Office\n <\/p>\n But the Academy of American Studies in Long Island City is friendly terrain. A volunteer working the event asks Weaver for a selfie. One of the tenants testifying knows her from organizing and gushes at first sight. Another is simply a fan. \u201cI\u2019m excited that it\u2019s you,\u201d a woman who sits down to testify says. \u201cThe housing czar!\u201d Weaver is a self-described nervous public speaker. (In her previous role, \u201cI made other people do the talking,\u201d she says.) But as people line up to tell her about their landlord woes, she seems very much at ease. Weaver knows this part:\u00a0where to direct someone who is being overcharged on rent, explaining what a tenants\u2019 association is and what it can do.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels to me like a leveling up of things that I was doing before,\u201d Weaver says. \u201cNot a big shift, but growth.\u201d Talk about the name of her office and she reframes the emphasis to put it back on the tenants themselves: \u201cThe most protected tenant is an empowered tenant who\u2019s organized with their neighbors and who knows their rights.\u201d This might sound like sloganeering, and it is, but it\u2019s also practical; Weaver needs tenants as much as they may feel they need her. There is a limit to how much the mayor\u2019s office can do \u2014 like, say, compel the governor to raise taxes in order to fund a set of programs that were central to one\u2019s campaign \u2014\u00a0but as an organizing apparatus, City Hall is an incredible pulpit. Weaver calls the city \u201ca majority tenant town<\/a>\u201d \u2014 70 percent of the people here do not own their homes \u2014\u00a0and knows that with those numbers comes power, if the administration can harness it. Which seems to be the basic idea tonight: part data collection, part mass catharsis event, part recruitment effort. (There are tables in the lobby set up for various government agencies and community organizations.) \u201cThe tenant-organizing stuff is not something that we\u2019re doing because it\u2019s nice,\u201d Weaver tells me.\u201cWe\u2019re doing this because it literally makes our work better and more efficient and more possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Photo: Kara McCurdy\/Mayoral Photography Office\n <\/p>\n The Mayor\u2019s Office to Protect Tenants has always felt a little like an afterthought. The first appointment Bill de Blasio made after creating it in 2019 served for just a year before being reassigned to Covid response. Then came one acting head and another sort-of head<\/a> under Adams, who essentially<\/a> dismantled it. Under Mamdani, it is still small (there is currently just one employee other than Weaver with plans for eight total) but clearly a priority. The new mayor is also using the office as a sort of coordinating force between different agencies, which is why there are so many other city officials at the night\u2019s hearings. (At one point, while waiting for tenants to arrive, I see Weaver teasing Housing Preservation and Development commissioner Dina Levy about her listening skills.)<\/p>\n And while the short list of her predecessors in the role have mostly come from elsewhere in government, Weaver is perhaps the most well-known member of the Democratic Socialists of America to get a day-one seat in City Hall. Weaver met Mamdani about a decade ago through their involvement in the organization: She was newly out of grad school at NYU and working as a tenant organizer in Brooklyn; Mamdani was working on a DSA-endorsed candidate\u2019s City Council campaign. But it was when Mamdani ran for state assembly in late 2019 and Weaver was leading the statewide organizing group Housing Justice for All that they really got to know one another. Weaver had just scored a historic win in Albany \u2014\u00a0passing the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which basically rewrote the playbook landlords had been using to flip rent-stabilized apartments to market rate. (For her efforts, The Real Deal called<\/a> Weaver real estate\u2019s \u201cgiant killer.\u201d) She and Mamdani started collaborating on policy priorities \u2014 Weaver has talked about<\/a> Mamdani asking her what she thought the most ambitious thing a new member of the assembly could do to protect tenants \u2014\u00a0and her housing campaigns. \u201cI think he had a perfect attendance at all the Housing Justice for All actions,\u201d Weaver says with a laugh.<\/p>\n When Mamdani announced his bid for mayor in 2024, he called Weaver again. They shared a belief in the political power of tenants and that those same tenants were generally lacking in political representation. (The last mayor<\/a> who rented was Ed Koch in 1977). \u201cI always thought that at some level there would be someone that I wanted to work for and I would want to make a transition into public service,\u201d Weaver says. And the 2019 rent laws that Weaver helped design pretty much set the trajectory for Mamdani\u2019s time in office. By effectively ending the speculative business model that had, for decades, turned the city\u2019s aging supply of rent-stabilized housing into steady moneymakers, landlords were left with significant debts. Some stopped maintaining their buildings \u2014\u00a0or used the rent caps as justification for what had been a longstanding practice of not maintaining their buildings. Tenants were left to live in apartments that, in some cases, were literally falling apart.<\/p>\n On its first day, the Mamdani administration tried to test the power of the office by jumping into one of the biggest foreclosure cases<\/a> of a rent-stabilized portfolio in history. Pinnacle Group, a billionaire-owned real-estate firm, had filed for bankruptcy on its 93 rent-stabilized buildings \u2014\u00a0many of which were falling into disrepair. The intended buyer, Summit Properties USA, had an equally bad record when it came to maintaining its properties. The administration threw its weight behind the Union of Pinnacle Tenants by trying to halt the sale and direct it toward a different buyer. It was both a Hail Mary and a declaration of intent; the results were mixed. They failed to stop the sale, but Summit agreed on spending $30 million in repairs. \u201cThere\u2019s many ways to win,\u201d she says. \u201cI think there is no way that Summit would\u2019ve been compelled to put $30 million into these buildings if it weren\u2019t for the tactics that the city took.\u201d It\u2019s a little bit of a spin. But governing, like tenant organizing, is often a matter of dealing in losses, especially when you are trying to do something that is largely unprecedented (and arguably very, very hard).<\/p>\n Photo: Kara McCurdy\/Mayoral Photography Office\n <\/p>\n There are likely more obstacles on the horizon. Governor Kathy Hochul has shown little interest in raising taxes on wealthy New Yorkers; the mayor\u2019s threat to raise property taxes to replace that funding was wildly unpopular. (He has reportedly dropped<\/a> that idea.) And the cost-saving efforts his office is making are paltry compared to the budget gap he is trying to cover. The Mamdani campaign was wildly successful at motivating tenants to vote. How do you motivate them to stay with you if you lose? \u201cI think we have been doing our best to communicate honestly and transparently about the constraints that the city is facing without sacrificing our shared values,\u201d Weaver says. \u201cThe most important thing is to just be clear with people what\u2019s going on.\u201d Another tactic the administration seems to be employing: making the things it can win \u2014\u00a0like the rent freeze that now seems within reach<\/a>, or a night of organizing tenants and venting about bad landlords \u2014\u00a0major, impossible-to-ignore spectacles.<\/p>\n As the hearings drag on into the evening, I watch as a tenant tells Weaver how her landlord turns her heat off at night. Then another who says she hasn\u2019t had heat for three years. People talk about leaks in their ceilings. Mold. Weaver turns to the City Hall intern taking notes to make sure she gets down the exact clause another cites in their complaint about co-ops. \u201cPeople have issues in their buildings, and they need to be heard,\u201d Weaver says. The person they think can help is seated right across from them. If that help does not come, the person they may blame is sitting there, too.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Kara McCurdy\/Mayoral Photography Office Cea Weaver is still adjusting. 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