Mayor Zohran Mamdani is standing by his appointment of housing activist Cea Weaver, who is serving as the director of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants.

Hours after he was officially sworn in as the mayor of New York City, Mamdani held his first official press conference to announce the appointment of Cea Weaver as the director of the newly revitalized Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants on Jan. 1.

The agency is responsible for coordinating the city's response to defend tenants' rights, unsafe housing conditions, landlord violations and tenant harassment.

In her first week on the job, Weaver has faced criticism for now deleted social media posts where she called homeownership "a weapon of white supremacy."

The posts pre-date 2020, but have caused discourse online, including former Mayor Eric Adams who weighed in.

"Homeownership is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth despite every obstacle," the former mayor wrote.

Despite the criticism, Mayor Mamdani says Weaver's track record of delivering for tenants across the city is why he hired her for the position.

"Cea Weaver is someone that we hired to stand up for tenants across the city based on the record that she had and frankly, if we just look at the last few days of work that she has done as part of our larger city government approach to the housing crisis in the city, you can already see results the kind of which we haven't seen for the past few years," Mamdani said at an unrelated press conference on Wednesday.

Weaver, who previously served as the executive director of Housing Justice for All and the New York State Tenant Bloc, is a nationally recognized affordable housing and tenants' rights advocate, according to the Mamdani administration.

Her previous work includes the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, that blocked landlords from raising rents when a tenant moved out of the apartment and deregulate rent-stabilized apartments.

Weaver also mobilized more than 20,000 tenants to vote in support of a citywide rent freeze, a key campaign promise of the mayor.

NYS Tenant Bloc responded to the criticism of Weaver calling them powerless.

"Tenants kicked real estate out of City Hall, and now landlords are panicking. The attacks on Cea Weaver — a proven tenant champion who's beaten back the real estate lobby again and again — are a desperate attempt to distract from the fact that we are in a new era for tenants in New York," said Ritti Singh, communications director for the NYS Tenant Bloc.

Mamdani's vetting process came into question when he appointed Catherine Almonte Da Costa. She who resigned after antisemitic social media that dated back to 2011 resurfaced a day after her appointment in December.

Mamdani was asked by a reporter on Wednesday if Weaver's tweets were fundamentally different from Da Costa's.

"The core issue at hand is what are we hiring this person to do? We are hiring them to stand up for tenants in a way that we haven't seen before - that's exactly what they're doing," Mamdani said.