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Newly unearthed video of New York City's notorious new renters' tsar has revealed her desire to restructure the housing market so that all Americans live in 'full social housing.'
Cea Weaver has gone viral yet again over controversial comments she made about the free housing market in a resurfaced video.
'The beauty of rent stabilization and rent control is that it weakens the speculative value of the real estate asset,' Weaver said in the now-viral clip. It is unclear when the footage was initially recorded.
'The value is no longer based on what the landlord is able to get, but rather it's based on a state public board deciding how much rent is going up.'
Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani's tenant advocate also argued that a strong rent control campaign that weakens the entire housing market would ultimately 'strengthen our ability to fight for social housing.'
In another interview that resurfaced this week, Weaver argued that 'white, middle-class homeowners are a huge problem for a renter justice movement.'
She argued that US public policy has pinned renters and 'cash poor homeowners, working class homeowners, and middle class homeowners' against each other.
She admitted that homeownership is America's only guaranteed retirement income, but still argued that her goal is to 'undermine the institution of homeownership.'
Cea Weaver (pictured outside her home last week) has gone viral yet again over controversial comments she made about the free housing market in a resurfaced video
Weaver (pictured in the now-viral video) revealed her desire to restructure the housing market so that all Americans live in 'full social housing'
'It's so messed up too because we don't have free college. We don't have Medicare for all. We don't have healthcare. We don't have stable pensions, so your home is the only way you can get that,' she said on the Bad Faith podcast in 2021.
She admitted that by telling Americans not to become homeowners that 'we're taking away the only "welfare system" that the United States.'
Weaver, however, justified the assertion by arguing that homeownership 'serves to completely divide working class people and protect those at the top.'
'It's really quite difficult because Blackstone is a bigger and worse target than Mrs Smith who owns 15 buildings, but Mrs Smith... still kind of sucks and has a lot more stability than renters,' she said.
Blackstone, based in NYC, is the largest alternative investment management company in the world.
Weaver claimed that there are more independent owners - whom she identified as being white and middle class - than there are institutions like Blackstone, alleging that poses a 'challenging dynamic' for renter justice overall.
'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,' she continued.
The comments are just the latest in a slew of remarks that have seen the tenant advocate ridiculed by critics.
In another interview that resurfaced this week, Weaver argued that 'white, middle-class homeowners are a huge problem for a renter justice movement'
Weaver has failed to respond to any of the Daily Mail's requests for comments. Last week, she burst into tears outside her apartment in Brooklyn (pictured) when confronted by a reporter over her assertion that it is racist for white people to own homes
Social media users have questioned the legality of Weaver's beliefs, likened her to communist Karl Marx and accused her of being uneducated about real estate and economics.
'She has zero clue how market actually work. Woefully unqualified for any role beyond barista,' one X user wrote.
'This mirrors almost exactly what Marx said about wages. Prices are set by workers' wages, not by markets,' another said. 'By that reasoning, we could simply pay everyone $500K/year, and prices would surely fall in line accordingly. Could we offer free tuition to ECON 101 and 102 for this woman?'
Another added: 'Not sure if it's constitutional or not but either way elite completely idiotic. If you remove incentives you will restrict supply. Simple as that.'
'She isn't concerned with constitutionality. She is so certain that her goals are right that she doesn't care about laws or even her fellow humans,' a poster replied.
One user even went on to argue that Weaver was actively trying to change America's core foundations.
'I've never witnessed anyone so arrogantly discuss the destruction of the American dream,' the poster wrote.
Cea Weaver, a progressive 'housing justice' activist, was named New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani's new director of the city's Office to Protect Tenants on his first day in office
Although Weaver has been extremely vocal about the dismantling of the American housing system, she has kept strangely quiet about her own family's contributions to the problems she has vowed to combat.
The hardline leftist's mother Celia Applegate, a professor German Studies at prestigious Vanderbilt University, owns a gorgeous $1.4 million home in America's fastest gentrifying city, where longtime black residents are quickly being priced out.
Applegate and her partner David Blackbourn, a professor of history, purchased their home in Music City USA's Hillsboro West End neighborhood in July 2012 for $814,000, according to county property records.
Since then, its value has soared by nearly $600,000 - a surge in value likely to infuriate Weaver, who in July 2018 tweeted: 'Impoverish the white middle class. Homeownership is racist.'
The activist, who has outraged New Yorkers with her calls to 'seize private property' and branded gentrification an act of white supremacy, has similarly failed to address how the push would impact her father, a history professor who is also a landlord.
Stewart A Weaver and his wife, Tatyana Bakhmetyeva, live in a picturesque home in Rochester's Highland Park neighborhood worth more than $514,000.
But the couple also own a near-$159,000 townhouse in nearby Brighton that they rent out as a secondary stream of income.
Her mother, Celia Applegate, owns a $1.4 million home in the gentrified Hillsboro West End neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee
Weaver's father, Stewart A Weaver, and his wife, Tatyana Bakhmetyeva, own and are landlords of a $159,000 townhouse in Brighton, New York
The University of Rochester professor and his wife purchased the home in June 2024 for $224,900, property records showed. But the Monroe County assessor's office last year only valued the residence at $158,600.
Mr Weaver has publicly backed his daughter's calls for tenant protections and even testified before the New York State Assembly's housing committee in May 2019 in favor of 'robust tenant protection' and rent stabilization.
Weaver has failed to respond to any of the Daily Mail's requests for comments.
Last week, she burst into tears outside her apartment in Brooklyn when confronted by a reporter over her assertion that it is racist for white people to own homes.
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