NEW YORK (WABC) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani defended one of his appointees on Wednesday as questions were raised about her past social media posts.
Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver, a passionate, 37 year-old tenant organizer, to his Office of Tenant Protection, on his inauguration day.
She’s a democratic socialist, like Mamdani, whose years-old social media posts expressed strong views on housing issues.
In a post in 2019 she called home ownership “a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
“Seize private property,” she declared in another Twitter post.
And in 2022 she wrote “Tax the rich… invest in the public good, stop all evictions and fund safe, stable public housing for everyone.”
“I think the core issue at-hand here is: What are we hiring this person to do? We are hiring them to stand up for tenants in a way that we haven’t seen before and that’s exactly what they’re doing,” Mamdani told reporters. “My focus as the mayor of New York City is to deliver stability in the city. And we know that one critical pathway to that stability is home ownership.”
Last month, Mamdani accepted the resignation of his appointments director after a series of her anti-Semitic posts surfaced, dating back more than ten years. That, he said, was different.
“I accepted Kat Da Costa’s resignation. Cea Weaver is someone that we hired to stand up for tenants across the city based on the track record that she had,” Mamdani said.
On NY1, Ms Weaver expressed “regret.”
“You know, those are certainly regretful tweets and not something that I would say today,” she said.
Ann Korchak, board president of the group Small Property Owners of New York, says some landlords are wary.
“To solve housing problems, you need to have dialog with all the stakeholders, and that includes the operators and owners of housing, as well as the tenants,” she said.
“I think she is the ideal person to put in that job. The question is, who are the other people that are going to be at the table talking about the interests of owners, the interests of financial investors, as well as the tenants?” Kathryn Wylde, who leads the city’s largest business group the Partnership for New York City, said.
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