Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s radical new tenant advocate once whined about gentrification in her Brooklyn neighborhood – despite being a white middle-class transplant who attended a pricey private liberal arts college.  

Cea Weaver, who has come under fire for previously blasting homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy,” dropped the eyebrow-raising remarks just months before Mamdani tapped her to be his new director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

“Where I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, we saw this cycle where landlords and bankers and policymakers had driven up the value of real estate using speculative financial capital, the housing market crashed, and then the solution to that was just a different private equity firm coming in and owning the buildings,” Weaver, 37, said in a winter 2025 interview with lefty magazine Dissent.

“This cycle fueled waves of gentrification in Crown Heights.”

She added that she and other tenants battled, “loopholes in rent stabilization and poor enforcement of tenants’ rights were driving a crisis of displacement and rising rents in the neighborhood overall.”

The Rochester transplant made no mention of her own potential contributions to gentrifying the area where she rents, instead blaming landlords and others for nudging out low-income Crown Heights residents.

The resurfaced interview came as Weaver addressed her past eyebrow-raising remarks, including calling for the seizure of private property and claiming, “There is no such thing as a ‘good’ gentrifier” in 2018.

She said on NY1 Tuesday night that some of her past remarks “are certainly not how I would say things today and are regretful.”

“But, you know, I do think my sort of decades of experience fighting for more affordable housing stands on its own,” she insisted. “I’m proud to be in this role fighting for stronger tenants’ rights.”

Outside her apartment building Wednesday morning, she broke down in tears when confronted by reporters before running back inside.

Weaver’s extreme stances have stoked the first major scandal for Mamdani’s mayoralty with the Trump administration even issuing a warning to the democratic socialist this week, saying it wouldn’t tolerate any civil rights violations apparently targeting white homeowners.

But the 34-year-old City Hall leader again stood by his Democratic Socialist of America comrade Wednesday, lauding her background as a housing advocate and saying she was hired to stand up for tenants across the five boroughs after a long career of helping renters.

“And frankly, if we just look at the last few days of work that she has done as part of our larger city government approach to the housing crisis in the city, you can already see results of the kind of which we haven’t seen for the past few years,” he told reporters at an unrelated event.

It’s unclear how much Weaver will earn in the new role, but the inaugural director for the Office to Protect Tenants, Jackie Bray, earned $196,500 in 2019 under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, according to public records.

Weaver attended Bryn Mawr College — a private college in Pennsylvania where tuition now costs as much as $88,000 per year — and then went to New York University.

Her mom owns a Nashville pad worth $1.6 million and is a professor at the prestigious Vanderbilt University, records show.

It’s not known how much Weaver’s rent is or if she lives with anyone, but at least one three-bedroom apartment in the 3-story, six unit building costs nearly $4,000 per month, according to a Zillow estimate.

Records indicate Weaver has lived in the building for around a decade, with one local resident calling her “part of the problem.”

“She’s gentrifying Crown Heights, right?” said Samuel, who is a 24-year-old City College of Technology student and resident of nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“Yeah, thousands coming from like Buffalo and Tennessee and Ohio and s–t like that.”

Crown Heights local Tisha, whose mother rents out units in a building, said landlords have bills to pay, too.

“Maybe if insurance wasn’t going up so fast or maybe if taxes weren’t going up so fast or maybe if electric, water, gas, all the bills weren’t going up so fast maybe the rent wouldn’t be going up,” said the 39-year-old. “She ever think of that?”

Other neighbors were also stunned by Weaver’s cache of far-left drivel.

“These ideas, they never work. They have never worked. My older sister bought a house in Floral Park. My parents live there with her now,” said Liam G., a 61-year-old Cuban-American.

“This is the dream. What she (Weaver) is talking about is the nightmare,” the four-year Crown Heights resident added.

Weaver, between 2010-15, was part of the Crown Heights Tenant Union, an organization that opposes “evictions, both legal and illegal,” and “all rezoning,” according to its website.

In the Dissent interview, Weaver explained she got into tenant organizing in the aftermath of the 2008 global foreclosure crisis.

“I was organizing in multi-family buildings that had gone into foreclosure,” she said.

“By the time a multi-family building reaches foreclosure, the landlord has probably tried to do everything possible to avoid it, including reducing maintenance costs by stopping repairs or harassing and evicting tenants so they can raise the rent.”

The office she will now head up for Mamdani is focused on protecting tenants against unsafe or horrible living conditions.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who nominated Weaver to the City Planning Commission in 2021 before she withdrew, defended Weaver, arguing there was truth to her past inflammatory statements.

“There have always been disparities around class and around race [with property ownership]. That is just a true statement.  You look at red line, the purpose of red lining — that is true,” he told The Post.

“Could it have been worded better? Yea, that doesn’t mean there’s not truth behind it,” he said.

“She’s been always good with housing tenants’ issues. Very good negotiator. Very pragmatic one. So, she’s a good pick.”

— Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy