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Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker announced new help for state residents seeking housing and rental assistance on Monday, offering grants of up to $25,000 thanks to federal funds set aside for that purpose, the Chicago Sun Times reported. The new dollars were just one part of Pritzker’s housing assistance announcement. He also said the state will end its eviction moratorium in August with a “gradual phase out over the next few months.” “It was clear when we implemented last year’s housing relief programs that the need was far greater than the dollars allocated to our state,” Pritzker said at the Segundo Ruiz Belviz Center in Chicago. “The Illinois Rental Assistance Program is a testament to how good government can make a life changing difference for people when our dollars … follow our values,” Pritzker said. “This program expansion will allow us to take that impact to new heights for tens of thousands of Illinoisans.” The governor was joined by state senators and representatives representing Chicago as well as other state officials for the rental assistance program announcement, which is expected to provide about 120,000 renters some relief.

A federal judge yesterday threw out the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's nationwide moratorium on evictions, a setback for the millions of Americans who have fallen behind on rent payments during the coronavirus pandemic, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich said that while there was "no doubt" Congress intended to empower the CDC to combat COVID-19 through a range of measures such as quarantines, a moratorium on residential evictions was not among them. Friedrich cited the "plain language" of a law called the Public Health Service Act, which governs the federal response to the spread of communicable diseases, even while acknowledging that the pandemic is "a serious public health crisis that has presented unprecedented challenges for public health officials and the nation." The U.S. Justice Department said it is appealing, and will seek an emergency order to put the judge's decision on hold. Evictions "exacerbate the spread of COVID-19," and the moratorium "protects many renters who cannot make their monthly payments due to job loss or healthcare expenses," Brian Boynton, acting assistant attorney general for the department's civil division, said in a statement. The White House has estimated that one in five renters were delinquent on payments by January, while the CDC has said more than 4 million adults who were behind feared imminent eviction. Judge Friedrich's decision benefits the many landlords struggling to pay their own bills because they are unable to collect rent from tenants. The CDC moratorium began last September and was scheduled to lapse on June 30. Other courts have been divided over its legality, with some also finding the CDC exceeded its authority. Friedrich, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, was the first to formally block the eviction ban. At least 43 states and Washington, D.C., have also temporarily halted residential or business evictions, though the protections are far from uniform.

Black homeowners are having a harder time catching up on missed mortgage payments than other borrowers, new federal research shows, the Wall Street Journal reported. The share of Black homeowners in forbearance stood at about 11% in mid-April, more than double the overall rate and that of white borrowers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The rate for Hispanic homeowners hovered around 8.4%. The mortgage forbearance program laid out in the March 2020 stimulus bill was designed as a short-term solution, a way for homeowners to postpone payments on federally backed mortgages until the economy and consumers recovered. That is how the program has functioned for many. The share of homeowners in forbearance has decreased for eight straight weeks, to 4.49% as of mid-April, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Almost one in 10 homeowners signed up for forbearance at the height of the program’s use last June. But the overall improvement masks a slower recovery for Black borrowers. Between June 2020 and mid-April 2021, the share of Black homeowners in forbearance fell 35%, compared with a 43% drop overall, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Asian, white and Hispanic borrowers saw improvement rates of between 45% and 53%.

According to the Princeton University Eviction Lab, 318,091 households have faced eviction proceedings during the pandemic in the 27 cities the research project tracks, including Phoenix, Milwaukee and Dallas, Reuters reported. Many more remain vulnerable to eviction and possible homelessness: By May, an estimated 7 million renters across the country will owe $40 billion in back rent, utilities and fees, Moody’s Analytics estimates. Before the pandemic, about 900,000 households were evicted each year. Most renters live in apartments or houses owned by small-scale “mom-and-pop” landlords, who often rely heavily on their rental income. But based on a review of hundreds of court filings across the country, as well as interviews with tenants, their lawyers and housing advocates, it’s the big, deep-pocketed corporate landlords with property portfolios spanning multiple states that have been the most aggressive in filing eviction cases, even as they have thrived in the pandemic. Since the pandemic began, large corporate landlords have filed nearly 70,000 eviction cases in just 27 counties in seven states analyzed by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a Chicago-based nonprofit that studies the impact of private equity investments on the public. Many of the big landlords, especially those focused on single-family homes, have benefited as higher-income families have fled to the suburbs for perceived safety and more space during the pandemic. Invitation Homes had its best year ever in 2020, with profits climbing to a record $200 million as occupancy rates neared 100%. Its share price has nearly doubled since March 2020. Invitation Homes ranked fifth among companies seeking evictions in the seven states examined by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, with 710 cases since the CDC moratorium took effect Sept. 4. Ahead of it were S2 Capital, a Dallas, Texas, investment firm, with 1,160 eviction suits; Ventron Management, with 1,134 cases against tenants in Georgia and Florida and which received $2.6 million under the federal Paycheck Protection Program; private equity firm Pretium Partners, which operates Progress Residential and Front Yard Residential, with 1,074 eviction suits; and Western Wealth Capital, with 1,018.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a rule yesterday enabling renters to sue debt collectors who fail to disclose the rights of tenants established in a recent federal eviction moratorium, the National Mortgage News reported. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the freeze on evictions due to the coronavirus pandemic last year. It prevents evictions in cases where tenants filed a written declaration of their inability to pay. A tenant who has not filed such a declaration can still be evicted. The moratorium ends June 30. The CFPB's interim rule requires debt collectors seeking to evict tenants to provide written notice of their rights under the CDC moratorium. The rule also prohibits debt collectors from misrepresenting tenants’ eligibility for protection from eviction. “No one should be evicted from their home without understanding their rights, and we will hold accountable those debt collectors who move forward with illegal evictions,” said acting CFPB director Dave Uejio in a press release. “We encourage debt collectors to work with tenants and landlords to find solutions that work for everyone.” The CFPB rule clarifies that debt collectors who fail to provide tenants written notice of their rights under the CDC moratorium are in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The rule, which will be effective May 3, applies to third-party debt collectors and attorneys acting on behalf of landlords.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is scrutinizing mortgage servicers' compliance with pandemic relief programs amid concerns struggling homeowners are not getting the help they need to avoid foreclosures, or are being discriminated against, Reuters reported. The CFPB crackdown by its policy, supervision and enforcement divisions could result in stiff penalties for those mortgage servicers found to have hurt borrowers, the regulatory officials, lawyers and industry executives said. In recent weeks, the agency has sent data requests to mortgage servicers, usually a company or a bank that processes mortgage repayments. It is seeking data on how they are handling mortgage holiday or "forbearance" programs and whether the temporary debt relief is likely to get borrowers back on their feet, said three people with direct knowledge of the matter, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because aspects of the discussions are private. The agency has also opened probes into a handful of mortgage servicers over their handling of forbearance requests.

The Biden administration again extended a federal moratorium on evictions last week, but conflicting court rulings on whether the ban is legal, plus the difficulty of rolling out nearly $50 billion in federal aid, mean the country’s reckoning with its eviction crisis may come sooner than expected, the Washington Post reported. The year-old federal moratorium — which has now been extended through June 30 — has probably kept hundreds of thousands or millions of people from being evicted from their apartments and homes. More than 10 million Americans are behind on rent, according to Moody’s, easily topping the 7 million who lost their homes to foreclosure in the 2008 housing bust. Despite the unprecedented federal effort to protect tenants, landlords have been chipping away at the moratorium in court. Six lawsuits have made their way before federal judges — with three ruling in support of the ban and three calling it illegal. The opposition started when landlords in Texas sued in the fall, arguing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had overstepped its bounds in implementing the ban. Apartment owners argued in their complaint that they built and maintained apartment buildings “with the reasonable expectation that they would be legally permitted to realize the benefit of their bargain by collecting monthly rent from their tenants.” District Judge J. Campbell Barker agreed. “Although the COVID-19 pandemic persists, so does the Constitution,” he wrote. The National Association of Home Builders joined Ohio landlords in another suit. The judge in that case, J. Philip Calabrese, also ruled against the ban, writing March 10 that “the CDC’s orders exceeded the statutory authority Congress gave the agency.” Treasury Department officials have been armed with nearly $50 billion in emergency aid for renters who have fallen behind and are racing to distribute it through hundreds of state, local and tribal housing agencies, some of which have not created programs yet. The idea is to get the money to renters before courts nationwide begin processing evictions again. “We are running the Emergency Rental Assistance Program every day like we’re going to lose the moratorium tomorrow,” said a Treasury Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the program before any formal announcements. The moratorium was not overly controversial at first, and it has received bipartisan support from lawmakers. It was formed when President Donald Trump and Congress directed the CDC to create a form tenants can use to declare that they cannot pay rent because of the pandemic and that they have been unable to secure other housing. Filing the form generally halts eviction proceedings.