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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.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Friday called on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to extend its eviction moratorium amid a massive backlog in the distribution of rental aid, The Hill reported. In a Friday statement, Ocasio-Cortez urged the Biden administration to prevent the CDC’s ban on most evictions from expiring on July 31 despite the agency saying in June it would not likely extend the ban past that date. Ocasio-Cortez said that it was “reckless” to allow the ban to lapse with a fraction of the $46 billion in federal rental aid actually in the hands of tenants, landlords and utilities companies. More than 4.7 million Americans are not current on their housing payments and expect to be evicted or foreclosed on within two months, according to a survey conducted by the Census Bureau between June 23 and July 5. Roughly 8 million also said they don’t expect to make their next housing payment on time.

An Atlanta-based federal appeals court yesterday dealt another blow to landlords seeking to end a nationwide eviction freeze put in place amid the pandemic, The Hill reported. The ruling by a divided three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals leaves intact the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) eviction moratorium, which is set to run through July. The move comes after the Supreme Court last month voted 5-4 to reject an emergency request from a separate group of landlords who also sought to have the eviction ban lifted, arguing it amounts to unlawful government overreach at a cost of some $13 billion each month to property owners. The eviction pause has faced numerous legal challenges, leading to a patchwork of legal interpretations nationwide on the moratorium's lawfulness. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., held in May that the moratorium was an invalid exercise of the CDC's authority. But the judge, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, delayed enforcement of her ruling, citing the risk to public health if evictions were allowed to proceed. Four of the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices indicated last month that they would have allowed Friedrich's ruling to take immediate effect while the Biden administration appeals. The 11th Circuit case arose when a group of landlords seeking to evict tenants for nonpayment of rent and a rental trade association sued in September. A district court judge rejected their request for a preliminary injunction, prompting their appeal to the 11th Circuit.

The Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 on Tuesday night to leave in place the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s ban on evictions, imposed to combat the coronavirus pandemic and prevent homelessness, the Washington Post reported. The ban has just been extended another month, until the end of July, and the Biden administration said it will end then. A group of landlords, real estate companies and real estate trade associations in Alabama and Georgia convinced U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich in the spring that the CDC lacked authority to impose the moratorium. But Friedrich stayed her order to allow appeals to continue. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit kept it in place, saying it believed the government was likely to prevail. At the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined fellow conservative Brett M. Kavanaugh and liberal Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to keep the stay in place. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett said they would have lifted the stay, which would have struck down the moratorium. Neither side explained its reasoning in the short emergency order. But Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately to say that while he agreed the CDC had exceeded its authority, this was not the time to scuttle the ban on evictions. “Because the CDC plans to end the moratorium in only a few weeks, on July 31, and because those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds,” the stay should remain in place, Justice Kavanaugh said.

U.S. home prices soared in April at the fastest pace since 2005 as potential buyers bid up prices on a limited supply of available properties, the Associated Press reported. The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city home price index, released Tuesday, jumped nearly 15% in April from the previous year. That is up from a 13.4% annual gain in March. Many Americans have sought more living space since the pandemic began, seeking larger homes in suburbs rather than apartments or smaller homes in cities. Historically low mortgage rates, restrained in part by the Federal Reserve’s low-interest rate policies, have also spurred demand, just as the large millennial generation ages into a peak home-buying period. The price gains have been so dramatic that home sales have started to slow as more would-be buyers are priced out of the market. Still, economists said there is little sign that the housing market’s blistering price increases are likely to cool off soon. “The forces that have propelled home price growth to new highs over the past year remain in place and are offering little evidence of abating,” said Matthew Speakman, an economist at real estate data provider Zillow. All 20 cities that make up the index reported higher year-over-year price gains in April than the previous month. Five cities — Charlotte, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, and Seattle — had the largest 12-month price increases on records dating back 30 years.