(The Center Square) – As backlash grows against his appointed tenant advocate, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not acknowledge her view that “homeownership is a tool of white supremacy.”
“My focus as the mayor of New York City is to deliver stability and we know one critical pathway to that stability is homeownership,” he said during a news conference Wednesday after a reporter asked if he agreed with Cea Weaver’s resurfaced social media comments from 2019 that said “private property including any kind of especially homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building public policy.’”
She later told The Washington Post that she regretted the remark.
Mamdani, the city’s first democratic socialist mayor, tapped Weaver, one of his former campaign advisors, to lead his new Office to Protect Tenants last week. As a prominent advocate for affordable housing, she lobbied for legislation passed in 2019 that prevented landlords from raising rent after tenants move out.
In one of her first official actions, Weaver will said she intervene in bankruptcy restructuring proceedings for Pinnacle Realty, a derelict management company responsible for more than 90 buildings across the city with lengthy records of maintenance complaints and code violations.
The city hopes to prevent a $451 million sale to Summit Properties USA in favor of an agreement that gives the government a more prominent role in rehabilitating and upkeeping the buildings.
“I think the core issue at hand is what are we hiring this person to do,” Mamdani said. “We are hiring them to stand up for tenants in a way that we haven’t seen before and that’s exactly what they are doing.”
Critics argue that rent-stabilization regulations like the city’s 2019 law have contributed to affordability problems. Unable to recoup the rising cost of property taxes, maitenance and utilities through rent payments, building owners have struggled to keep up with code violations and fallen behind on payments, contributing to more foreclosures and bankruptcies.
Commercial and real estate bankruptcies have been on the rise in the city since 2022. A Bloomberg Tax review of the Eastern District of New York found that hundreds of financially distressed landlords have filed for bankruptcy more than once over the last five years.
