Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly installed tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, got emotional Wednesday morning as she ducked reporters’ questions about what critics are calling gentrification hypocrisy.
Weaver — named Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants — briefly emerged from her Crown Heights building around 9 a.m., then retreated inside after being pressed about a Nashville home worth $1.6 million that her mother owns, according to the reporting.
The blowback erupted after old posts resurfaced in which Weaver went scorched-earth on gentrification and homeownership.
“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 has also spoken publicly about gentrification pressures in Crown Heights—including in an interview with Dissent last winter.
“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.”
More over at The New York Post:
Zohran Mamdani’s woke, privileged tenant advocate Cea Weaver breaks down crying when asked about hypocritical gentrification comments https://t.co/EJ5FOswgmD pic.twitter.com/c5Jh5WEPAo
— New York Post (@nypost) January 7, 2026
