Mamdani’s Communist Housing Chief: A Complete Disaster

Mayor Zohran Mamdani just handed the keys to NYC housing policy to someone who thinks homeownership is “white supremacy,” calls for seizing private property, and literally tweeted “elect more communists"—and her own mother owns a $1.6 million home.

‘Elect More Communists'—Her Own Words

Cea Weaver isn’t hiding her ideology. In 2017, she tweeted: "and communist” followed by “elect more communists.” In 2019, she wrote: “Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.” She’s called for “impoverishing the white middle class,” endorsed a “no more white men in office platform,” and wished white men “would one day burn” for taking credit for others’ work.

And just recently, video surfaced of her 2021 podcast appearance where she laid it out plainly:

Archived tweet

NEW from me: During a 2021 podcast appearance, Cea Weaver said that white middle-class people were a "huge problem" for her vision of housing justice "White, middle-class homeowners are a huge problem for a renter justice movement."

Jon Levine @LevineJonathan January 14, 2026

“White, middle-class homeowners are a huge problem for a renter justice movement.” This isn’t a policy disagreement—it’s explicit racial animus wrapped in activist jargon.

Archived tweet

When Weaver’s comments first got attention a bit ago, you saw a lot of people saying stuff like, “ignore her bad comments about white people, she’s genuinely an impressive policy person.” But what should strike you is how completely unimpressive all this stuff is. It’s just straightforward retread Communist nonsense. These are all bad ideas that if implemented would make the country much worse.

wanye @xwanyex January 15, 2026

He’s right. These aren’t innovative ideas. They’re Communist 101—and they’ve failed everywhere they’ve been tried.

Too Radical for the NYC Council—So Mamdani Bypassed Confirmation

Here’s the thing: New York City already rejected Cea Weaver. In 2021, enough NYC Council members opposed her nomination to the City Planning Commission that it was withdrawn. She was too radical even for New York Democrats.

Democratic Assemblyman Kalman Yeger put it bluntly: “Guess it’s easier to name a communist to a position that doesn’t require confirmation.” He added that her comments about homeownership being white supremacy “would surprise a lot of my Black, Latino and Caribbean-American constituents who have struggled their entire lives to buy a piece of New York.”

Council members were concerned about both her incendiary comments AND her ties to far-left organizations. So what did Mamdani do? He gave her even more power—as Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants—without requiring any confirmation vote. Democracy in action.

‘Out of Your F—ing Mind'—Even Democrats Are Horrified

Former Mayor Eric Adams didn’t hold back: “You have to be completely out of your f—ing mind to call that white supremacy.”

Adams continued: “Homeownership is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth. That level of thinking only comes from extreme privilege and total detachment from reality.”

When pressed on her past statements, Weaver offered only vague regrets: “Some of those things are certainly not how I would say things today, and are regretful.” Which things? She won’t say. The Wall Street Journal dubbed her and her allies “Socialist Crybullies"—and the name fits.

The $1.6 Million Hypocrisy

Speaking of privilege: Weaver’s mother Celia Applegate is a Vanderbilt University professor who owns a $1.6 million classic Craftsman home in Nashville, Tennessee—a city ranked as the MOST gentrified in America during the 2010s.

When reporters confronted Weaver about this, she literally ran away crying. According to the Daily Mail, "The 37-year-old began running down the street, then said 'No’ through tears.”

So the woman calling homeownership “white supremacy” benefited from generational wealth built through… homeownership. The hypocrisy would be laughable if she wasn’t about to wreck millions of lives.

The Communist Two-Step: Destroy Buildings, Then Seize Them

Weaver’s explicit goal is “massive government interventions” and “public housing for everyone.” She wants government to tell landlords: “we’re gonna take this building away from you.”

National Review identified this as a “classic two-step trap” used by communists for over a century:

Step 1: Cap rents at unsustainable levels so landlords can’t afford maintenance.
Step 2: Seize buildings because landlords are “derelict” for not maintaining them.

She’s not even hiding it. Weaver openly admits rent control is “an effective way to shrink the value of real estate"—the quiet part out loud. She celebrated that rent-stabilized buildings now sell at 67% of their 2018 value, calling it "prices coming closer to reality.”

The NY Post theorizes that Weaver and Mamdani aim to financially cripple landlords to allow the city to acquire their properties cheaply—which requires deteriorating buildings first.

50,000 Vacant Apartments—And Counting

The 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act—which Weaver championed—has already removed over 50,000 apartments from the NYC market. Why? Because legal rents don’t cover renovation costs, so landlords let apartments sit empty rather than lose money fixing them.

According to the NY Post, approximately one-third of buildings with significant rent-stabilized units are already in financial distress, with rental income insufficient to cover operating expenses. The city’s own NYCHA properties would “far surpass” the worst private landlords on violations if included in tracking lists—yet can’t be fixed because rents are too low.

The results are predictable: Manhattan median rents are expected to exceed $5,000 in 2026—up 18% from late 2024. Brooklyn median rents will surpass $4,000. St. Paul saw an 80% drop in new construction permits after implementing similar rent caps. Even if Mamdani delivers all 200,000 promised housing units, NYC will still be 500,000 units short over the next decade.

This is the real-world impact of Weaver’s ideology: fewer apartments, higher rents, worse conditions.

The Ideology Behind the Disaster

Weaver is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Her explicit goal: “The real, long-term solution to the housing crisis is public investment—publicly separated, permanently affordable housing.” She wants a government-run Social Housing Development Authority to buy up private housing.

This is textbook communism: destroy private property, replace with state control. National Review put it plainly: “A commie by any other name still smells as foul.”

Mamdani’s “democratic socialist” label is just rebranding. As I’ve noted before, characterizing socialism in benign terms is a classic rhetorical move. But the record of those who declared “property is theft” is—without exception—one of wrecked societies and immiserated lives.

Cea Weaver isn’t just some fringe activist who got lucky. She’s the architect of laws that have already destroyed 50,000 units of NYC housing. Now she has even more power. This is what happens when ideologues who openly call for communism are handed the reins of government. The results are always the same: fewer homes, higher rents, and a city that works for no one except the bureaucrats running it.

New Yorkers deserve better than someone who runs crying when asked about her own family’s homeownership while telling working families that their dreams of property ownership make them complicit in “white supremacy.”

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