A Q&A With Cea Weaver, New York Tenants’ New Woman on the Inside

An organizer in New York City for over 15 years, Weaver previously served as executive director for Housing Justice for All and the New York State Tenant Bloc, which last year recruited tens of thousands of rent-stabilized tenants to support Mamdani and his pledge to freeze their rents. Weaver was also one of the driving forces behind the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (HSTPA), which closed loopholes that had long allowed New York landlords to deregulate thousands of rent-stabilized apartments.

Weaver’s first days were clouded by an attempted smear campaign launched in the pages of The New York Post, which circulated Weaver’s old tweets in an apparent attempt to force her out of the job. Mamdani, who faced many similar attacks during his campaign, has stood by her amidst calls for her termination.

Weaver sat down with In These Times to discuss why the campaign against her has been a mistake, on top of how Mamdani’s City Hall can support renters’ collective bargaining campaigns, hold the worst landlords accountable and fight for tenant ownership of housing.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Birmingham: Mayor Mamdani announced both that you would be leading the Office to Protect Tenants and that it was being ​‘newly revitalized.’ Can you talk about how you saw this office functioning under the Eric Adams administration, and then what you’re hoping this revitalization will look like? 

Cea Weaver: So the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants was formed under the de Blasio administration and initially had a mandate to educate tenants around their rights. It was really critical when we passed the HSTPA in making sure that rent stabilized tenants in New York knew about it. Under the de Blasio administration, it was a really effective community organizing vehicle. I like to say that the most protected tenant is an empowered tenant who knows their rights and is able to organize with their neighbors to get those rights enforced. Under the Adams administration, I think what happened to the office is a combination of what happened to many agencies across City Hall, which is that it was allowed to go fallow. It receded from importance, both in terms of the staff that it had and the centrality of the voice of tenants and outreach and political decision-making in the administration. The work continued, but it continued quietly and with a much lower budget than it needed. 

Mayor Mamdani is putting this work at the center of his vision for housing. He’s an extraordinary communicator about tenants, their rights, their position in New York City government and bringing visibility to the work that public servants are doing every single day to keep tenants in their homes. That is a way for tenants to learn about their rights.

Birmingham: Why was the passage of the HSTPA, which you were instrumental in, so influential for housing in New York? How are you taking your experience in that fight into the Mamdani administration?

Weaver: The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, to me, is really critically important for two reasons. I think the first reason it’s important is that, prior to the passage of the HSTPA, there was this tremendous financial upside to displacing people from their homes in order to raise their rents. And I think what the HSTPA really did was reset the value of housing to be worth what it means for the people who live in it. It’s about the fact that the main point of housing is to house people. The second reason I think the HSTPA is so important, and this is the ethos I’m really eager to bring into the Mamdani administration, is that tenants are a majority of the city, 70% of the city, and a key constituency whose opinions needs to be reflected in political and policy decision-making. I think it was really a moment when some of the established norms of politics were turned on their head in Albany, and we’ve continued to build on that moment ever since.

Birmingham: We’re only a few weeks in and already the right-wing media ecosystem has come after you in full force, primarily over tweets of yours that are half a decade old or more. After The New York Post published a series of articles about you during the first week of January, you had everyone from the New York Apartment Association to the editorial board of the Washington Post warning about the supposedly radical nature of your ideas. What do you make of these attacks?

Weaver: I think that the ways in which the right-wing media tried to make this a personal thing about me was a mistake. What this role is about is getting tenants organized and supporting groups of unionized renters and their ability to ensure that their housing is high-quality, their rights as renters are maintained and their voices as a collective class of people are reflected in the policy decisions at City Hall.

Birmingham: As you find your footing in this role, what are you seeing as the biggest limits to your office’s power?

Weaver: New York City is facing a tremendous budget crisis. When you start to think about what it means to publicly steward housing, often what that means is using the city’s financial resources to invest in and stabilize distressed housing and transfer it to responsible owners who are willing to publicly steward it in partnership with the city. The city has done that for decades and will continue to do that for decades more. Some of the work that I’m really inspired by and hoping to expand are in programs like the city’s Third Party Transfer Program, which has led to the creation of thousands and thousands of units of shared equity housing.

All of that being said, we don’t have an unlimited amount of capital to stabilize distressed portfolios. So I think we’re wanting to look at many other creative ways that you can facilitate tenant control that are not simply leveraging the city’s ability as a mortgage lender. That could look like encouraging tenants to form tenant unions, or using the enforcement power that the city has to make sure the housing maintenance code is respected and maintained. The oversight role that we play in making sure that our housing is high-quality and that tenants rights are protected is a mechanism to create leverage for organized tenant associations, and that’s the kind of thing that we’re looking to explore. I think that through this role, we are going to stabilize a lot of housing, and we are going to ensure a lot of tenants’ homes are protected.

Birmingham: The public advocate has released this year’s list of the worst landlords in the city. Combined, just the top ten landlords on this list have tens of thousands of open violations, often leaving tenants living in unsafe conditions, while the city is missing out on untold millions in unpaid fines from landlords. How will you address the gap in enforcement of living standards?

Weaver: One of the things that have been very valuable about previous iterations of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants that I’d like to maintain is the coordination between Department of Buildings, Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), and the Public Engagement Unit, which is being reworked into the Office of Mass Engagement. All of those things combined can build a more efficient code enforcement system. Things that are as simple as allowing tenants to schedule times when code inspectors might come by their buildings. It’s very important to make our code enforcement system more efficient, more responsive and better able to track housing quality concerns before they get very bad. We actually want a system where tenants are organized, they can ask landlords for repairs, and those repairs come.

In addition, the housing maintenance code has not been rewritten in a very long time. So I’m interested in taking a very hard look at it and seeing not only what’s in there that we don’t really need anymore, but what is missing?

Birmingham: Mamdani made your appointment at a building owned by Pinnacle Group, a notorious slumlord that filed for bankruptcy last May and put their portfolio of many thousands of units up for auction late last year. The Mamdani administration attempted to intervene in the situation. What power does the city have to take on these bad actors?

Weaver: I’ve been tenant organizing in New York City for over 15 years, and Pinnacle has been on my radar as a tenant and as an organizer the entire time. Mamdani’s is really one of the first mayoral administrations I’ve seen willing to take a big swing on behalf of tenants against this bad actor. I find it incredibly powerful that we were willing to experiment with intervening in the bankruptcy proceedings when we knew it was an uphill battle, when we know that bankruptcy court is not a place for enforcement of tenants rights.

Now, the results maybe weren’t exactly what we wanted in terms of stopping a sale to Summit, but I am 100% confident that some of the declarations that Zohar Levy, the managing director of Summit Properties, made in front of the bankruptcy judge, where he committed to correcting violations within six months, committed to a $30 million repair fund, none of that would have happened if it weren’t for the fact that the city was taking a swing.

We are going to learn a lot about ways that the city can be bold and creative in protecting renters rights over the course of the next four years. I’m tremendously hopeful, actually, following what happened with the Pinnacle case. I hope that the tenants stay organized. Call 311 if Summit is not standing up to the commitments that they made in front of a judge. City Hall’s door is open.

Birmingham: We’ve seen in the last few years an emergence of larger and larger campaigns from tenant unions for collectively bargained leases. In New Haven, we’ve seen collectively bargained leases that have been won thanks to groups like the Connecticut Tenants Union, but those efforts have also been supported by city government encouraging landlords to come to the bargaining table. Is your office assessing how you might be able to use the city’s levers of power to encourage landlords to bargain with their tenants?

Weaver: I’m interested in figuring out if this office can support that. We actually facilitated a meeting between Hannah Srajer, the president of the Connecticut Tenants Union, and some folks at HPD, the New York City housing department last week.

The mayor has been out there walking the picket line with the nurses who are on strike right now. This is a pro-worker mayoralty. It’s a pro-tenant mayoralty. We are very interested in figuring out how tenant collective bargaining can improve living conditions at the distressed portfolios that are coming to the top of the worst landlord list, for example.

When I’m talking about what it means to truly preserve tenant-controlled housing, there are two outcomes.

One outcome of tenant control is you are able to use public resources to come together with your neighbors, maybe using tools like public subsidy, to turn your building into a shared-equity cooperative that the tenants co-own with their neighbors. Another option is you have a really strong tenant association that’s meeting with the landlord regularly and getting the things that you want because you’re working together. Would you rather be a member of a union in a unionized workplace or be a member of a worker co-op and own your own means of production yourself? I think both of those options are really solid preservation options that are completely in line with what I hope this office can support.

Ultimately, the mayor is an organizer. The mayor won this race because of organized renters. We will govern successfully if renters continue to organize.