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Meet Cea Weaver, the Tenant Leader Who Terrifies NYC Landlords

By
Liza Featherstone

The recent right-wing obsession with Cea Weaver, a longtime tenant organizer appointed to lead the Office to Protect Tenants, reveals how shaken New York City’s real estate elites are by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pro-renter agenda.

Perhaps no other individual has had as big of an impact on tenant organizing and protections, and on shaping the thinking of New York socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani on housing, than Cea Weaver. (Michael Nagle / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In Trump’s America, with so much breaking news for the media to cover, it might have seemed odd to observe the presence of journalists and photographers staking out the Crown Heights apartment of a new City Hall appointee — heading a small office that doesn’t even have any official staff — for days at a time in early January. The media was so desperate for a glimpse of this person, you’d think a movie star (or maybe a serial killer) had just taken up residence in the modest Brooklyn neighborhood.

They were looking, instead, for Cea Weaver.

This month, the right-wing New York Post has run at least twenty articles about old tweets by Weaver, socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani’s appointee to head the Office to Protect Tenants, an office that the new mayor revived after years of neglect under the Eric Adams administration. It seems like a curious use of media resources — until you consider the importance of real estate in New York City, and of Weaver herself in leading a movement against the city’s real estate capitalists.

The controversy itself, over comments made in the late 2010s that could be seen as derogatory to white homeowners and opposed to private homeownership as a principal means of wealth accumulation, — was explored by my Jacobin colleague Ben Burgis and reflect unhelpful ways of talking about politics (as Weaver herself stated in her response to the controversy). But the feeding frenzy over Weaver, who has written for Jacobin numerous times over the years, was not really about her old tweets.

She was targeted for one reason: she has been an effective tenant leader in New York City, a city in which 70 percent of residents are renters. Of those renters, more than half struggle to afford their rent, while one in three of the city’s renters spend more than half their income on rent. Displacement, overcrowding, and poorly maintained buildings are common.

No individual has done more in recent years to redress this situation than Cea Weaver. As the city’s preeminent real estate newspaper, The Real Deal, put it in a headline, Weaver has “long been a thorn in the real estate industry’s side.”

The real estate industry in New York City used to have it pretty good and still does, with even liberal Democrats bending eagerly to its whims. But that may have begun to shift over the past decade. Cea Weaver and the tenant movement she leads, and organizations like New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), which she has profoundly influenced, are the main reasons why.

How She Started

Weaver, who comes from Rochester, New York, began organizing tenants in 2010 in New York City during the foreclosure crisis, first as an AmeriCorps volunteer, then with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB). A tenant herself, interested in improving her own living conditions as well as those of her neighbors, she played a key role in a tenant movement that was pressuring banks to repair and maintain buildings while they were in foreclosure. They also won major settlements in which, in some cases, the buildings’ deeds were transferred to partial city ownership.

Weaver and her comrades saw this as a strategy to expand publicly supported, affordable social housing. But that didn’t work, she has said, because of the many loopholes in the city’s renter protection laws at that time, which enabled landlords and banks to push tenants out, flip buildings, and continue making profits, driving up housing prices in an endless speculative drive that benefited only the very few.

That experience, Weaver says, “was formative to me in thinking about what tenants’ role is, and how organized tenants can intervene against big banks in order to set buildings on a path towards public stewardship.”

After that, Weaver helped found the Crown Heights Tenants Union, a multigenerational and multiracial working-class organization. As she explains, new residents to Crown Heights like herself and older longtime residents realized they were “facing a shared problem, experienced differently”: renters lacked protection against capitalist greed. New tenants were not informed by their landlords of their buildings’ rent-stabilized status, allowing landlords to charge them market-rate rents rather than the lower, stabilized rates. Longtime residents, meanwhile, “were being pushed out and harassed so that the newer residents could then be illegally and systematically overcharged.”

Organizing at this time, Weaver found that in addition to strong tenants’ unions, limited equity cooperatives, a model in which tenants buy shares in a cooperative development rather than purchasing their units, were another option for making housing better and more affordable.

“Tenants collectively owning and managing their homes is a great thing,” she says. “So was a tenant union that’s bringing the landlord to the table to have a say in what maintenance day-to-day looks like and to make sure that tenants’ rights are protected. That’s also a form of tenant control.”

Building More Housing Is Not the Problem

In its efforts to create more affordable housing, the Bill de Blasio mayoral administration leaned heavily on rezoning to allow for higher-density development. This was widely criticized on the Left (including in this magazine), since much of the new housing constructed thanks to rezoning was unaffordable to most New Yorkers and thus became synonymous with gentrification.

But it was clear to Weaver at that time that rezoning and building more housing wasn’t the real problem. The underlying problem, she says, was “speculation in the real estate market.”

We need to build more housing, she argues, and we should protect people who already live in the existing housing. “The problem is that developers are explicitly trying to raise property values” to make profits.

If developers build significant numbers of new housing units, and rent did begin to fall, “the industry by their own logic would stop building.” The underlying problem isn’t housing construction; it’s that speculation is so profitable.

That profitability needs to be reined in through better tenant protections, Weaver argues, including by closing loopholes in rent stabilization and other tenant protection laws. With stronger protections and strong tenants unions to help enforce them, she says, “we would be able to build tons of housing, protect people in their homes, and have a more equitable housing market.”

With that insight, in 2017, Weaver started Housing Justice for All, a coalition of more than eighty groups representing tenants and homeless people across the state, that successfully pushed for what Weaver calls “pretty extraordinary rent stabilization reforms”: a groundbreaking package of tenant protections in 2019, the eviction moratorium during the pandemic when so many were losing their jobs, and Good Cause Eviction (a law limiting landlords’ power to evict tenants) in 2024.

“Tenants are uniquely positioned,” she says, “both as a political majority” and as people with “real economic power” who keep the city running. For over fifteen years, Weaver has focused on building that power through organizing tenants into tenants’ unions, and building political power through pushing pro-tenant legislation and electing pro-tenant politicians into office.

Influencing a Movement — and a Mayor

If there’s one way that Weaver has strongly influenced Zohran Mamdani, NYC-DSA, and the broad New York left, it’s through the insight that by organizing tenants, socialists build a movement that curbs the power of capital, redistributes wealth, and improves the living conditions and political power of the working class. This focus on tenants has been a winning and powerful one for New York socialists and is a huge part of the reason that Mamdani is in office.

Jeremy Cohan, a member of DSA’s National Political Committee who has been organizing with NYC-DSA since the early Bernie Sanders years, credits Weaver with this focus. Knocking on doors for Julia Salazar, NYC-DSA’s first socialist to win state legislative office, in 2018, Cohan recalls, “When we would say, ‘she doesn’t take any real estate money,’ people would be like, okay sign me up.” That emphasis, in a city where even progressive politicians like Bill de Blasio were heavily influenced by real estate, was Weaver’s influence, Cohan says.

There’s also no question that Weaver has been a huge influence on Mamdani. The two have organized together for years. As Mamdani said on the Bad Faith podcast in 2021, “I get most of my housing knowledge from Cea.”

No wonder the Right has been so obsessed with her tweets. Just in the last couple weeks of the mayoral election, the ruling class of this city spent $55 million to elect Mamdani’s opponent, Andrew Cuomo — about $65 per vote. As Cohan says, “they do not want a pro-tenant New York. They want a pro-landlord, pro-capital New York.”

These right-wing attacks on Weaver, then, are understandable yelps of ruling class pain. The landlord class does not want to see Cea Weaver in a position of state power.

“When they see that the Left has power, when they see that tenants have power, they try to scare us,” says Ritti Singh, a fellow tenant organizer with Housing Justice for All, another housing coalition Weaver founded and led. Attacks on Cea Weaver are “absolutely a response to the fact that we’re in control. We kicked real estate out of City Hall.”

The right-wing attacks are to be expected; it’s not even the first time she has faced them. In 2021, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams named her to the City Planning Commission. The real estate industry got hold of the tweets, and City Council blocked her appointment. Mamdani, however, is standing firm. He seems to know that for a mayor elected by organized renters, Weaver is critical to his administration.

What Weaver Plans to Do in Office

She’s heading the Office to Protect Tenants, an office created under Bill de Blasio that Eric Adams — who once said, somewhat bafflingly, “I am real estate” — allowed to wither through underfunding.

Under Weaver, despite the press’s best efforts to distract her, it’s already busy. She envisions the office as a kind of sister agency to the Office of Mass Engagement, which is also headed by a serious socialist organizer, Tascha Van Auken. Weaver takes seriously the co-governance potential of this administration, the idea that a left administration could help the working class organize against capital and could invite people in to participate in making policy that affects them, and could work closely with the forces on the ground that are doing that organizing.

One of the first initiatives in this collaboration between the two offices will be a series of “Rental Ripoff” hearings, allowing tenants to speak out on problems with bad landlords that are affecting their daily lives. Another collaboration is the Tenant Support Unit, which is part of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which will proactively reach out to tenants to let them know their rights and how they can organize with others in their building. (This is similar to organizing that democratic socialist state senator Phara Souffrant Forrest, another veteran of tenant organizing in Crown Heights, runs out of her Brooklyn office.) Tenant assemblies are likely to be another forum for Weaver’s new office.

All this is a refreshing antidote to the passive, consumerist relationship most people have with the government, one in which it disappoints us, and we complain, often on social media, where our gripes often have less consequence than a bad Yelp review for a restaurant. Weaver says,

It’s not just about government being responsive to you, it’s about you being able to participate in governance of the city around you. Rather than tenants being a constituency to be managed or an obstacle to a component of the agenda, tenants are the ones who are the foot soldiers of the mayor’s agenda in their neighborhoods, in their communities.

Weaver has credibility on co-governance. Housing Justice for All, the coalition she ran for eight years, says Sam Stein, a housing policy expert who has organized with Weaver, is “a much more democratic coalition than any other one that I’m a part of.” The issues and the strategy are very much shaped by the members, despite the fact that there are more than eighty organizations in the coalition. That means that even as leftists credit Weaver with a certain analysis or with influencing politics and winning big fights, it’s more accurate to say that the tenant movement had these ideas and did these things.

Weaver’s appointment, along with Mamdani’s executive order bringing back the Office to Protect Tenants, was announced the day of Mamdani’s inauguration in a most unusual forum: a rental apartment building in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, where organized tenants have been fighting for better conditions. They say their corporate owner, the Pinnacle Group, who is selling the building, neglects it.

Weaver speaks at a rental apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, on New Year’s Day, 2026. (Office to Protect Tenants)

A question that comes up a lot around Mamdani’s housing policy is what role should private landlords and developers play in creating housing under a socialist administration? With a housing shortage and a currently hopeless federal government, Weaver says, “not everything is going to be publicly stewarded housing. We can’t publicly finance every single building in New York City.”

Acknowledging the power of her tweets against private property to inflame the Right, she says that she now believes that “collective control over housing doesn’t mean elimination of private ownership, necessarily. It’s a spectrum. What I hope to accomplish is working with tenants to encourage organizing to drive toward public stewardship and to improve the city’s housing quality.”

Tenant organizing can make even privately owned housing affordable and decent, she says. “I hope we can encourage tenants to get organized, encourage tenants to work together with their neighbors, and hold their landlords accountable for providing safe and quality housing. And I want the city to be a partner in that.” She continues, “I want tenants to know that if they come together and if they get organized and if they form a union in the building, the city of New York has their back, and that we will be partners with you in enforcing your rights to safe, inhabitable housing and to collective community control over your homes.”

If Weaver is successful in this role, the vitriol against her will certainly continue. The media attacks were no fun for her, but the episode illustrates her success at fighting for the working class. If, under Weaver and Mamdani, New York City becomes a better place for renters to thrive and stay in their homes than for real estate investors to fatten their portfolios, the attacks will escalate. The Left will need to grow accustomed to welcoming their hatred: when they’re mad, it means we’re winning.