Jon Levine writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the dangerous ideas espoused by a newly installed New York City official.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D., N.Y.) top housing official, Cea Weaver, openly declared plans to destroy property values in New York City during a May 2021 podcast appearance alongside her new boss.
“Our goal is to have the housing actually be worth less,” Weaver said on the Bad Faith podcast, hosted by Briahna Joy Gray, a former press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) who was fired by the Hill after rolling her eyes at the sister of a hostage in Gaza who urged Gray to believe Israeli women whom Hamas had raped.
Weaver floated expanding rent control as a way to decrease the value of housing as an investment.
“They need to be rent-controlled, and the reason why they need to be rent-controlled is not because, like, rent control is inherently socialist, but because rent control limits the speculative value of the land,” Weaver said.
Mamdani, then a relatively unknown state assemblyman, offered his new housing czar effusive praise.
“I get most of my knowledge on housing from Cea, so if you get it from me, it’s just not coming from the source,” he cooed.
Mamdani’s decision to tap Weaver as head of his Office to Protect Tenants has already resulted in scandal for his young administration. She denounced private property and homeownership as “weapon[s] of white supremacy” in a since-deleted 2019 post on X, and called to “impoverish the *white* middle class”—arguing that “homeownership is racist”—in other posts.
“I think the reality is, is that for centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good,” Weaver said in a 2021 video. “And we are going to—and transitioning to—treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently, and it will mean that families, especially white families, but some [families of color], who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to properties than the one that we currently have.”
