Tipsheet

Cea Weaver Describes Rent-Control As a Way to Cripple the Real Estate Market

Dmitri Bolt
Dmitri Bolt  |  January 15, 2026 2:30 PM

A resurfaced clip of Cea Weaver, Zohran Mamdani’s Director of the NYC Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, is going viral after she praised rent control as a tool to “directly challenge the logic of unfettered profit” in real estate, boasting that it “weakens the speculative value of the asset.”

“We decided that fighting for rent control was a strategic and critical first step in the fight for full social housing,” she said in the clip. “A lot of times, people ask, ‘Why are we fighting for rent control when we have NYCHA? We should be fighting to save public housing.'”

“We decided that through a program like rent control, we are able to directly challenge the logic of unfettered profit in the real estate market,” she continued. "We are able to directly challenge housing as a wealth-building tool and, through regulation, strike a blow to the entire real estate industry at once."

The beauty of rent stabilization and rent control is that it weakens the speculative value of the real estate asset. 

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.

"And yes, that board is controlled by the real estate industry, and yes, there could be a better way to regulate it," she said. "But the idea is that we could weaken the entire industry at once through a strong rent control campaign, and that would strengthen our ability to fight for social housing.”

It’s unclear when or where the clip first surfaced.

Some critics pondered why on Earth any voter in their right mind would support devaluing the real estate market. “How many New Yorkers (or Americans for that matter) want to support policies that weaken the speculative value of real estate?” one person wrote.

“No one with two brain cells to rub together is going to invest in properties that lose money and have them just be taken over by the state. It’s a lose/lose/LOSE scenario,” another said.

Weaver has courted significant controversy since joining Mamdani’s socialist administration, fueled by resurfaced posts in which she condemned homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy,” praised the government’s “sacred right to seize private property,” and called to “impoverish the white middle class.” 

Despite the backlash, Mamdani and his socialist allies have continued to stand by the Director of the NYC Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.