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….
Auteur: Liza Featherstone
