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The Senate voted on Wednesday to take up a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that would make far-reaching investments in the nation’s public works system, as Republicans joined Democrats in clearing the way for action on a crucial piece of President Biden’s agenda, the New York Times reported. The 67-to-32 vote, which included 17 Republicans in favor, came just hours after centrist senators in both parties and the White House reached a long-sought compromise on the bill, which would provide about $550 billion in new federal money for roads, bridges, rail, transit, water and other physical infrastructure programs. Among those in support of moving forward was Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). McConnell’s backing signaled that his party was — at least for now — open to teaming with Democrats to enact the plan. The deal still faces several challenges to becoming law, including being turned into formal legislative text and clearing final votes in the closely divided Senate and House. If enacted, the measure would be the largest infusion of federal money into the public works system in more than a decade. The compromise, which was still being written on Wednesday, includes $110 billion for roads, bridges and major projects; $66 billion for passenger and freight rail; $39 billion for public transit; $65 billion for broadband; $17 billion for ports and waterways; and $46 billion to help states and cities prepare for droughts, wildfires, flooding and other consequences of climate change, according to a White House official who detailed it on the condition of anonymity.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) yesterday launched a website meant to connect struggling tenants with federal rental aid providers with less than a week until a federal eviction ban is set to expire, The Hill reported. The CFPB’s rental and utility assistance tool is intended to match tenants with the state and local organizations charged with disbursing more than $46 billion in federal aid meant to prevent a wave of evictions. While the federal government has disbursed all of that money to state and local distributors, less than 7 percent of it has reached tenants, landlords and utility companies by the end of June. Millions of U.S. households could face eviction proceedings within days with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) moratorium set to expire on Aug. 1. Researchers at the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated 15 million people in 6.5 million households are at risk of eviction when the moratorium expires.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said yesterday that the U.S. economic recovery could take a major hit if the Biden administration fails to extend the federal government’s pandemic moratorium on student-loan payments past September, Bloomberg News reported. “Resuming these payments could stall our country’s economic recovery. It could bring millions of loan borrowers to the edge of financial crisis,” Schumer said yesterday. Student-loan debt has almost doubled over the past decade, reaching $1.58 trillion in the first quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the payment moratorium has helped people reduce other debt, such as credit-card balances. Ending the pause threatens to be a drag on an otherwise brisk economic rebound. Senate Democrats, led by Schumer of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, are pressing President Joe Biden’s administration to extend the pause until the spring, and to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt. Warren cited a Pew Charitable Trusts survey showing two-thirds of borrowers saying it would be difficult to afford payments if they resumed the following month. Read more.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on August 3 at 10 a.m. EDT titled, “Student Loan Bankruptcy Reform.” More details forthcoming.

Almost all 2,000 students at South Carolina State University owed money to the school by the end of spring semester this year. Some owed less than a dollar, others were hundreds or even thousands of dollars past due on expenses such as tuition payments and housing fees, the Wall Street Journal reported. Without paying off the bills, many students couldn’t register for the next term or, in the case of seniors, get their diplomas. The school said this month it had wiped away $9.8 million in debt for more than 2,500 students — including current students and some who had already dropped out because they couldn’t afford to pay off their balances and re-enroll. Historically Black colleges and universities, such as South Carolina State, are springing students from the academic version of debtor’s prison, clearing their account balances so they can continue on with, or complete, school. More than 20 HBCUs are using federal pandemic funds for debt relief, according to a tally by the United Negro College Fund, a scholarship organization for private historically Black colleges and universities. HBCUs received $2.6 billion of the $40 billion set aside for higher education under this spring’s American Rescue Plan Act. Their students are overwhelmingly from low-income backgrounds, and many are first-generation college students; schools were told to give priority to the neediest students when distributing a portion of the funds and say these students were hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic downturn.

Official advisers to Washington Prime Group Inc. stockholders, skeptical of the company’s proposed sale to SVPGlobal, are trying to slow down the mall landlord’s bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. A government-appointed group of Washington Prime stockholders has asked Judge Marvin Isgur to extend key deadlines in the insolvency proceedings by more than a month, arguing in court papers that the group’s advisers don’t have enough time to evaluate the real estate investment trust’s chapter 11 exit plan. Washington Prime may be worth more than the plan implies, but more time is needed to figure that out, the group says. Washington Prime entered bankruptcy last month after the pandemic forced shoppers to stay home, crushing its tenants and sapping revenues. But rising vaccination rates and a resurgent U.S. economy have begun to reverse the company’s fortunes, making it difficult to pin a value on its portfolio of roughly 100 shopping centers across the U.S. The company plans to exit bankruptcy by handing ownership to investment firm SVPGlobal in exchange for debt forgiveness, assuming no better offers come in. But the plan’s August approval deadline leaves relatively little time for competing bidders to make moves, and the company has said new offers must be all cash and exceed $2.3 billion. Read more.

Occupancy issues are at the heart of many significant retail cases, as detailed in the ABI publication Retail and Office Bankruptcy: Landlord/Tenant Rights, available at the ABI Store. 

Owners of the Aloft Miami Brickell hotel filed for bankruptcy due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the South Florida Business Journal reported. Mary Brickell Village Hotel LLC, a subsidiary of Miami-based real estate developer and hotelier HES Group, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Wednesday in the Southern District of Florida. The declaration comes after DF VII Reit Holdings LLC, an affiliate of New York-based Torchlight Investors, filed a foreclosure complaint agains the company and its guarantors over missed mortgage payments starting in April 2020, according to court documents. Court documents show the hotel's loan was made for $17 million in 2014 and sold on the commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) market. According to CMBS data from Bloomberg, Torchlight Loan Services was appointed special servicer 60 days after the loan went into default.

After hitting the pause button during the pandemic, the eviction machinery in New York City, one of the world’s most expensive housing markets, will likely soon start firing up again, the New York Times reported. For roughly 16 months, the city’s renters have been shielded from eviction under broad protections imposed by the federal government and New York State to keep people in their homes during the coronavirus outbreak. But those safeguards are soon expected to come to an end, setting off alarms about the fate of struggling tenants who owe months of unpaid rent, cannot make their next payments and could face homelessness. Nearly 500,000 households in New York City have rent arrears that collectively total more than $2.2 billion, according to an analysis of census data by the National Equity Atlas, a research group associated with the University of Southern California. At the same time, the financial challenges facing many tenants are squeezing smaller landlords who rely on rent to pay their own bills. The federal moratorium, enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been extended several times throughout the pandemic but is now scheduled to expire at the end of July. After an additional one-month extension in June, the agency said that the protections would likely lapse for good this month. But tenants across New York State will have another month of protections under a state eviction moratorium, which expires at the end of August. New York State officials have not given any indication that the moratorium will be extended again, as it has been multiple times during the pandemic. New York State has set aside $2.7 billion in financial aid, largely from the federal government, that tenants can request through an application the state launched in June. If their applications are approved, up to a year’s worth of unpaid rent will be covered, as well as a year’s worth of unpaid utilities. Lower-income tenants can qualify for an additional three months of rental payments. The payments go directly to the landlord.

The 20 Republican-led states that reduced unemployment benefits in June did not see an immediate spike in overall hiring, but early evidence suggests something did change: The teen hiring boom slowed in those states, and workers 25 and older returned to work more quickly, the Washington Post reported. A new analysis by payroll processor Gusto, conducted for The Washington Post, found that small restaurants and hospitality businesses in states such as Missouri, which ended the extra unemployment benefits early, saw a jump in hiring of workers over age 25. The uptick in hiring of older workers was roughly offset by the slower hiring of teens in these states. In contrast, restaurants and hospitality businesses in states such as Kansas, where the full benefits remain, have been hiring a lot more teenagers who are less experienced and less likely to qualify for unemployment aid. There’s a growing trend in help wanted ads of lowering the age and experience requirements, especially in the hospitality sector, according to QuickHire, a recruiting firm in Wichita. At 715, a restaurant based in Lawrence, Kansas, the youngest employee is 15, and the owner, Katrina Weiss, has many teens working as hostesses, assistant servers and table bussers. Weiss said she has been inundated with applications from teens this summer, but few from workers in their 20s or 30s.