Mamdani defends ‘housing justice’ pick after getting slammed over her white supremacy posts, record of mom’s $1.6M home. Here’s NYC’s real problem

Weaver has irked powerful people, many of them allies of President Donald Trump.

Shortly after her appointment, a number of controversial pre-2020 social media posts surfaced in which Weaver described home ownership as “a weapon of white supremacy” while also calling to “impoverish the white middle class.” (1)

New York mayor Eric Adams slammed the comments, writing that homeownership “is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth despite every obstacle (2).”

“That level of thinking only comes from extreme privilege and total detachment from reality,” he said on X.

Describing Weaver as a “woke renters’ rights honcho,” New York Post picked up on the privilege theme by reporting that Weaver’s mother is a Vanderbilt University professor whose Nashville home is worth $1.6 million (3).

Harmeet Dhillon, the U.S. Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, responded to Weaver’s resurfaced posts by declaring that the Justice Department “will NOT tolerate discrimination based on skin color (4).”

Meanwhile, The Washington Post weighed in with an editorial suggesting that Weaver’s old tweets indicated that she planned to seize people’s private property in her new role (5).

In response to the firestorm, Weaver has walked back her comments, describing the old posts as “inelegant.” In an interview on Spectrum News on NY1, she said she wouldn’t phrase things that way now (6).

“I’m going to try to stay laser-focused on improving housing quality and supporting New Yorkers who are renting and struggling to stay in the city,” she said, prioritizing rent stabilization and affordable home construction.

As The New York Times reports, Mamdani remains supportive of Weaver (7).

But controversy aside, she faces a near-Herculean task considering the dire state of New York’s housing market.

Biting into the Big Apple’s housing crisis

The majority — 71% — of New York City’s 8-million-plus residents are renters, a higher proportion than anywhere else in the U.S. (8)

Unfortunately for those millions of renters, New York City also has the highest rents in the country. Realtor.com reports that in Q3 2025, median rent in New York City reached (9):

• Nearly $3,600 for a zero to two-bedroom space (up 5.4% year over year)
• Nearly $5,000 for three or more bedrooms

Some boroughs saw even more dramatic year-over-year rent increases:

• Manhattan up 6%
• Brooklyn up 6.8%

Realtor.com concluded that if average New York City renters were to use the money they spent on rent to buy a home elsewhere in the U.S., they could afford a $400,000 and $690,000 mortgage “in some of the most popular cities.” (10)

The challenge is that most of the people struggling the most with rent are those low-income or unemployed New Yorkers who can’t afford a roof over their head, let alone buy a home.

The Coalition for the Homeless organization warned that “homelessness in New York City has reached the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s,” with an estimated 350,000 unhoused New Yorkers, including families and children, last year (11).

New York’s Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development (ANHD) said the main reason people are homeless in New York City is a lack of affordable housing along with overcrowding and “hazardous housing conditions.” (12)

Is Weaver up to the challenge?

Weaver said she’s dedicated to improving housing conditions for renters across the city.

But she acknowledged that taking on negligent New York landlords “is going to be challenging.” (13)

Weaver told Spectrum News she wants to incentivize landlords to repair and improve their rental units by taking advantage of city-based subsidies and loans.

She said she will also support landlords by advocating for property tax controls and insurance reforms at the city and state level.

“I think people underestimate (Weaver) if they think she’s just an ideologue,” Vicki Been, New York’s former Deputy Mayor overseeing housing and economic development, told the New York Times. “She’s very savvy, strategic. Ideologically driven, of course, but also practical.”