Mamdani’s Rent Czar Breaks Down When Asked About Mother’s Reportedly $1.6M Tennessee Home

A senior aide in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration grew visibly upset when asked about her mother reportedly owning a home worth millions.

Cea Weaver, a far-left activist who heads Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants, apparently teared up and ran down the street when reporters — including one from the Daily Mail — approached her outside her Brooklyn apartment Wednesday morning, according to a Daily Mail report.

Weaver was asked about her mother, Celia Applegate, who reportedly owns a home in Nashville, Tennessee. Through tears, Weaver replied, “No,” declining to comment, before quickly retreating back inside her building, according to the report.

The encounter has drawn attention to Weaver’s past statements criticizing private property ownership. She has previously argued that owning private property perpetuates “white supremacy” — despite her own mother, a professor of German Studies at Vanderbilt University, who owns a Craftsman home worth $1.6 million, the New York Post reported, citing records.

In a 2019 post on X (then Twitter), she wrote, “Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy,” according to screenshots. (RELATED: Turns Out Mamdani Rent Czar’s Own Mom May Be ‘White Supremacist’ According To Her Logic)

However, at the time Weaver sent the post, her professor mother had already been the owner of a 3,400-square-foot home in Nashville for seven years.

Applegate and her partner bought their home for $814,000 in 2012, and its value has since doubled to $1.6 million, according to property records cited by the New York Post.

NYC’s Tenant Director, Cea Weaver:

“People like home ownership because they like control, which is rooted in a racist and classist society”

“This is why rent control is important” pic.twitter.com/1zQ1NL0ZxY

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 6, 2026

Weaver’s past criticism of homeownership resurfaced Monday in a viral X thread by writer Michelle Tandler, which featured more than a dozen screenshots from Weaver’s now-deleted account dating from 2016 to 2022.

Beyond her social media activity, several of Weaver’s earlier remarks opposing private property ownership were also captured on video.

“I think the reality is, is that for centuries we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good,” she said, adding that “transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently,” Weaver said in the 2021 YouTube video for the NYC Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization to which both she and Mamdani belong.

Now that the backlash has ignited over her blatant hypocrisy, Cea Weaver now says of her insane “home ownership is a weapon of white supremacy” comments:

“Some of those things are certainly not how I would say things today.”

These commies, LOL https://t.co/ZDTx70JFnb pic.twitter.com/ohAiXLwK4y

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) January 7, 2026

“And it will mean that families, especially white families but some POC [people of color] families who are homeowners as well, are gonna have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have,” Weaver added in the video.

After the posts resurfaced and circulated widely online, the Mamdani official described her past remarks as “regretful.”

“Regretful comments from years ago do not change what has always been clear — my commitment to making housing affordable and equitable for New York’s renters,” Weaver said in a Tuesday statement to The New York Times, released by Mamdani’s press office.