Mamdani backs squatters’ rights in video demonizing ‘billionaire’ Jewish ‘slumlord’

The mayor’s video also gives a brief history of rent control that fails to mention the downsides of the policy, or of price controls generally.

By Ira Stoll, The Washington Free Beacon

A new 13-minute video released by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani backs the idea that property should be controlled by people who occupy it, not those who own it.

“In the end a home is not defined by a deed or a lease but by those who live in it,” the narrator says at the conclusion of the video.

The video extensively features Cea Weaver, the director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver has a track record of comments calling for an end to private property rights.

A 2018 tweet from Weaver said, “Impoverish the white middle class. Homeownership is racist/failed public policy.”

In another video conversation that took place in 2021, before Weaver became a city official, she said:

“I think the reality is that for centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And we are gonna… and transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are gonna have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

In a 2020 video she advised even tenants who had funds available to cease paying rent and talked about “the short term transitional demands that we have to get out of this trap of private property.”

The Mamdani administration’s slickly produced video opens with close-up images of Weaver, wearing a Soviet-red zippered sweater and looking directly into the camera while seated, legs crossed, in an armchair before what appears to be a City Hall fireplace.

“This is Cea, Cea Weaver … she’s here to tell us a story about one of the worst landlords in New York City,” the video says.

The video demonizes one landlord, Joel Wiener of Pinnacle, while praising tenant organizers: “everyone should feel so proud of the work that they did advocating for themselves and their neighbors.”

A 2026 City Journal article noted a legal brief that said, as City Journal summarized it, “Pinnacle’s properties had fewer violations than the citywide average; that none of its buildings came close to meeting the city’s threshold for ‘unsatisfactory’ housing (three or more violations per unit); and that, had one tenant not vandalized an elevator and barred Pinnacle from entering her apartment to make repairs, the number of violations would have been even lower.”

A 2017 Bloomberg article identified Wiener as a billionaire, though dozens of properties he then controlled have since been sold in a bankruptcy proceeding.

An image in the video that portrayed Wiener was originally erroneous; it was actually a picture of someone else, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

The city eventually updated it with a different image. It’s only one of many ways the video was deceptive and inaccurate.

The mayor’s video also gives a brief history of rent control that fails to mention the downsides of the policy, or of price controls generally.

Those downsides include less dynamism than would be typical of a market-based system, because tenants who obtain below-market-rate apartments tend to stay in place forever, or at least until they die and their children can take over the lease.

In addition to the cavalier attitude toward property rights and the skewed account of history, the video also traffics in antisemitic stereotypes.

One tenant laments that after her apartment building was acquired by the landlord, the lobby no longer was decorated for Christmas.

Another says her building was infested with rats and roaches. The landlord is described as “exploiting” and “speculative.”

An article in JNS noted that the tenant organizers praised in the Mamdani video had their self-described origins in Crown Heights Tenant Union’s Palestine Solidarity Working Group, and that the Pinnacle Tenants website claims “in occupied Palestine, Zionist investors are counting on the displacement of rent-stabilized tenants in Crown Heights to see a return on their investments.”

The narrator of the video, actor Morgan Spector, is so anti-Israel that in a June 2025 interview with Rolling Stone, he faulted Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for insufficient devotion to the cause of Gaza

. “I’m half-Jewish, on my father’s side, and I was raised by parents who were very hostile to organized religion,” he said.

“It seems to me that the fundamental thing that makes someone Jewish is whether they practice the Jewish faith, and I don’t. I guess I do possibly feel a greater responsibility as an American who is seen as Jewish to speak up about what’s happening in Gaza, because Jewish safety is so often used to justify what is being done there, and I don’t think that’s legitimate.”

The mayor’s press office did not immediately respond to a request to clarify what the video meant when it said occupants, not leases or deeds, define a home. A representative for Wiener declined to comment.

Weaver, the daughter of professors, met Mamdani in 2019 “at a reading group for the socialist magazine Jacobin,” Jonathan Mahler reported in the New York Times magazine earlier this year.

The latest video got a gushy (“energetic, cinematic style … modern, buzzy visual language”) advance preview attention from another far-left publication, The Nation, which notes that Mamdani has a video team “currently made up of six filmmakers whose backgrounds span from video journalism to streaming documentaries.”

Mamdani has spoken openly about seizing property from landlords he deems irresponsible and transferring the ownership to government or nonprofit control.

It’s a radical enough plan that it takes a powerful propaganda effort to prepare public opinion for it.

So far, it has generated only limited pushback.

One advocacy group, NYC Common Sense, said, “when an undisclosed sum of public dollars is used to create a video narrated by a well-documented extremist in an effort clearly intended to generate viral attention, priorities have become recklessly misplaced. … Making short films does not clean the streets or keep New Yorkers safe or even make the buses faster.”