Category: Mamdani housing crisis
Mamdani housing official decries ‘white middle-class homeowners’ for stalling ‘renter justice’ in resurfaced video
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration got hit with another blow in the form of a resurfaced video of more extremist comments from its top housing official.
Cea Weaver has been previously criticized for her socialist schemes on housing, but the newest video shows her taking aim at “white, middle-class homeowners.”
‘Unless we can undermine the institution of homeownership … it’s a really difficult organizing situation we find ourselves in.’
“I think that United States public policy has done a really, really, really good job of pitting cash-poor homeowners and working-class homeowners and middle-class homeowners against renters, and we need to figure out how to navigate that as organizers,” said Weaver in a video shared by the Free Beacon.
She went on to say that the real threat to “renter justice” was not institutional investors like BlackRock, but rather smaller-scale investors who own numerous housing units.
“It’s just this challenging dynamic,” she continued in the 2021 interview with Briahna Joy Gray. “White, middle-class homeowners are a huge problem for a renter justice movement.
She added, “Unless we can undermine the institution of homeownership and seek to provide stability in other ways, I don’t know — it’s a really difficult organizing situation we find ourselves in.”
Mamdani tapped the socialist housing activist to lead his Office to Protect Tenants, leading many to unearth her previous statements espousing statist schemes to erase private ownership of housing.
“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 one video interview. “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 [people of color] families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”
In the latest resurfaced video, Weaver went on to say that massive taxation would be necessary to fund expanded social service programs.
“We need a national movement to pass universal rent control to limit landlords’ ability to endlessly profit on our homes, to give tenants the right to form a tenants’ union where they live, and to really block evictions,” she added. “But rent control is not enough. People need money. We need to tax billionaires and transform that into cash assistance for renters. And we need to chip away at home ownership, and that means — that means Medicare for All, that means, like, a deep investment in real social service programs.”
RELATED: ‘You have to be completely out of your f***ing mind’: Eric Adams rips into Mamdani aide
Even some on the left have recoiled at the extremism from Mamdani’s administration and the comments from Weaver associating homeownership with white supremacy.
“Homeownership is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth despite every obstacle,” said former NYC Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, on social media.
“You have to be completely out of your f***ing mind to call that ‘white supremacy,'” he continued. “That level of thinking only comes from extreme privilege and total detachment from reality.”
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