WATCH: Mamdani defends homeownership amid backlash to appointee’s racial comments

(The Center Square) – As backlash grows against his appointed tenant advocate, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not acknowledge her view that “homeownership is a tool of white supremacy.”

“My focus as the mayor of New York City is to deliver stability and we know one critical pathway to that stability is homeownership,” he said during a news conference Wednesday after a reporter asked if he agreed with Cea Weaver’s resurfaced social media comments from 2019 that said “private property including any kind of especially homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building public policy.’”

She later told The Washington Post that she regretted the remark.

Mamdani, the city’s first democratic socialist mayor, tapped Weaver, one of his former campaign advisors, to lead his new Office to Protect Tenants last week. As a prominent advocate for affordable housing, she lobbied for legislation passed in 2019 that prevented landlords from raising...