Mamdani Appoints New Heads Of Housing Development, Buildings, Tenant Protection
Zohran Mamdani’s administration is kicking off in earnest — and with it, the 34-year-old mayor of New York City has unveiled three new appointments to execute his housing agenda.
Mamdani named Dina Levy, a state housing veteran, as Department of Housing Preservation and Development commissioner on Sunday, days after naming Ahmed Tigani, another Bill de Blasio alum, as the new Department of Buildings commissioner and Cea Weaver, a longtime landlord antagonist, as the head of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.
The new appointees join Leila Bozorg, the deputy mayor for housing and planning, as the names added to Mamdani's ranks who will have the most influence and interaction with the real estate industry.
Levy, the incoming HPD commissioner, most recently spent nine years with the New York state Division of Housing and Community Renewal. She has also spent time at the New York Attorney General’s Office, designing programs that used settlement funds from the Great Recession to help homeowners.
Now, she will supervise a series of key housing-related issues that Mamdani campaigned on, as both tenants and landlords scrounge to pay their bills, in a role that oversees financing income-restricted housing developments, penalizing bad landlords, running affordable housing lotteries and administering rental vouchers.
Tigani, Mamdani’s incoming DOB head, was former Mayor Eric Adams’ acting HPD commissioner between March and December, according to his LinkedIn.
The role is a slight switch from the role he is leaving, swapping duties like affordable housing development coordination for ones including leading city building regulation efforts and promoting construction site safety.
Nonetheless, Tigani has almost a decade and a half in and around city government, having served as DOB commissioner for a period in de Blasio’s administration before serving as deputy commissioner and chief diversity officer, then as deputy commissioner for HPD's Office of Neighborhood Strategies for the duration of the Adams administration.
And in one of his first executive orders, Mamdani revived the tenant protection office created by de Blasio in 2019 to focus on surveying housing standards on behalf of tenants. On the same day, he appointed Weaver as its chief.
Weaver’s new role may raise some hackles in CRE. She played a key role in backing the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which is reviled among landlords, then pushed for an expansive version of the good cause eviction laws passed by Albany in 2024.
As the former executive director of Housing Justice for All and the New York State Tenant Bloc, she also called for canceling rent payments during the pandemic. Her appointment was made at the site of a Pinnacle Group apartment building embroiled in bankruptcy, which Mamdani hopes to intervene in.
