Cea Weaver, a longtime housing activist and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was tapped by Mamdani to be his director of the Mayors Office to Protect Tenants.
Speaking about housing policy and equity in a March 2021 DSA video, Weaver said, “For centuries we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good, and we are going to…in transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity, will require that we think about it differently.”
“Families, especially White families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have,” she added.
Weaver also faced backlash for a 2019 tweet where she wrote, ” including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a masquerading as wealth building public policy.”
Weavers statement drew the attention of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, who told Fox News that the “Civil Rights Division of the DOJ is on high alert as to the radical agenda promised by Mayor Mamdani, much of which is at odds with our federal Constitutional and civil rights norms.”
who spoke with Fox News Digital say Weavers views are “insulting,” and paint landlords with a broad and unfair brush.
Jan Lee, a third-generation Chinatown property owner and board member of the Small Property Owners of New York (SPONY), said Weaver’s comments ignore both history and the lived experiences of immigrant landlords.
“I think that the true socialist views toward housing and taking housing away from people like myself is the racist element in this,” Lee said. “I think when you start to lump all of us together and say that we’re all the bad thing that’s keeping people out of housing, that’s racist. We’re right out of the gate in this administration, starting off with extreme hostility for property owners.”
Lee emphasized his familys deep roots in the city, noting that his family has been housing providers in New York City since the early 1900s.
He pushed back forcefully on the notion that property ownership equates to White supremacy, pointing to the history of immigrant communities striving and struggling to acquire a piece of the American dream.
“I think comments from a White woman individual who’s now in this seat of government saying that home ownership is some form of White superiority hasn’t lived the life of my family and many of the families who are small property owners of New York who are not White,” Lee said. “Black owners were barred from owning property. There were laws made against Chinese about Japanese Americans in the United States for owning property, so to say that owning property is a form of White supremacy is completely, completely out of line.”
“And it denies the history that many people of color have had to leave. It’s very insulting when you have the privilege that she has to sit there and say these things in 2026 without understanding that when my family bought our properties, the existed. We weren’t even allowed to come into this country,” he continued.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major U.S. federal law to ban a specific ethnic group, Chinese laborers, from immigrating to the U.S. It suspended immigration for 10 years and denied citizenship to Chinese residents. It was not repealed until 1943.
Ann Korchak, board president of SPONY, echoed Lees concerns and called the rhetoric divisive.
“I think that language like that is insulting,” Korchak said. “[Weaver] should come to a SPONY meeting and she would be blown away by the diversity of our organization.”
“New York has
