OAN Staff Cory Hawkins
12:13 PM – Wednesday, January 7, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ‘s appointed Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, 37-year-old Cea Weaver, previously claimed that home ownership is a “weapon of White supremacy,” challenging the fundamental American principles of private property rights, capitalism and the American Dream.
Mamdani named Cea Weaver, 37, a Democratic socialist and housing activist, to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants on January 1st, during his first news conference on his first day in office.
Weaver first made the claim in an August 2019 post on X, though her account has since been deactivated.
“Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy,” reads a screenshot of the full post shared by the conservative X account “Libs of TikTok.”
Another X account, @PNWConservative, also shared a video of Weaver saying “for centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good.”
Socialist thinkers often point back to pre-industrial times or indigenous land-use models where “the commons,” land used by everyone for grazing or farming, were the norm. They view the shift toward individualized property as a historical “enclosure” that only benefits the wealthy — at the expense of the poor.
“In transitioning to treating it as a collective good and toward a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently, and it will mean that families, especially white families but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than we currently have,” she said in the undated video.
Ironically, Weaver’s mother, Celia Applegate, reportedly owns a $1.6 million home just south of the main strip in Nashville, Tennessee.
Weaver was a leader of organizations such as Housing Justice for All and New York State Tenant Bloc, according to Mamdani’s office’s Facebook post on January 2nd. She is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as is Mamdani.
While leading the New York State Tenant Bloc, “she helped pass the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, landmark legislation that closed loopholes landlords used to raise rents and push apartments out of stabilization,” according to Mamdani’s office.
Mamdani has also stated that Weaver will “work with us to hold landlords accountable and ensure New York City tenants are living in safe, clean homes.”
“For too long in our city, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it,” he said last week. “Our City Hall will change that.”
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