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A temporary U.S. ban on evictions in parts of the country hit hard by the pandemic can remain in place, a federal judge in Washington ruled, a victory for the Biden administration’s efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus, Bloomberg News reported. In a ruling on Friday, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich rejected a plea by landlord groups to block the new eviction moratorium established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, even as she voiced concerns over the legality of the policy. The decision means the ban, set to last until Oct. 3, can stay in place for now, though it will face further court challenges from landlords. Friedrich, a critic of the moratorium, wrote that she was forced to keep the freeze in place because of a ruling by the U.S. appeals court in Washington that allowed a previous nationwide version of the policy to stand. “Throughout the pandemic, preventing evictions and keeping people in their homes has been a proven way of slowing the spread of Covid-19,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement. “We are pleased that the district court left the moratorium in place, though we are aware that further proceedings in this case are likely.” Psaki also urged state and local officials to move faster in distributing almost $47 billion in emergency rental assistance as the legal wrangling over the moratorium continues. Just 12% of the first $25 billion Congress allocated had made its way to eligible households in the first half of the year, Treasury Department data show, though the pace has been accelerating, with more than $1.5 billion doled out in June alone. While she believes the moratorium is legally dubious, she wrote, “the court’s hands are tied.”

More than seven months after it was launched, the biggest rental assistance program in U.S. history has delivered just a fraction of the promised aid to tenants and landlords struggling with the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported. Since last December, Congress has appropriated a total of $46.6 billion to help tenants who were behind on their rent. As of June 30, just $3 billion had been distributed, though a senior official said the Biden administration hoped at least another $2 billion had been distributed in July. While the program is overseen by the Treasury, it relies on a patchwork of more than 450 state, county and municipal governments and charitable organizations to distribute aid. The result: months of delays as local governments built new programs from scratch, hired staff and crafted rules for how the money should be distributed, then struggled to process a deluge of applications.

Shared office space giant WeWork and Cushman & Wakefield PLC, one of the world’s largest commercial real-estate firms, are negotiating to form a $150 million partnership to navigate the new world of remote working and flexible workplaces, the Wall Street Journal reported. As part of the alliance, Cushman would make a $150 million investment in the planned merger between WeWork and a public company later this year. That merger, expected to value WeWork at $9 billion including debt, will cap off the firm’s effort to reconstruct its balance sheet following the high-profile collapse of its planned initial public offering in late 2019. The deal with Cushman comes as office-building owners and tenants are struggling to plan for returning tens of millions of employees to downtowns and suburban office parks after some 18 months of working from home. Many thought that Labor Day would be a major turning point. But concerns about vaccination rates and variants of the COVID-19 virus have forced many companies to delay their plans. WeWork and Cushman executives feel that by teaming up, they can offer office-building tenants and landlords help in reshaping the office-building industry while addressing increasing pressure from employees for more flexible work arrangements. Already, some of the biggest American corporations have announced plans to allow some form of remote working for the indefinite future. Cushman, which had $4.17 billion in revenue the first half of 2021 and operations in 60 countries, has a big business in managing office space for tenants. Cushman executives think WeWork’s technology, app, reputation for hip spaces and other amenities will help give the partnership a competitive edge.

The apartment was just what Chanque Jones needed: four bedrooms, and $500 cheaper than the run-down house she had been renting back in Chicago. It was a fresh start for her three sons, as well as for her mobile manicure business. Then an old eviction case turned up on a routine background check prepared for her landlord. It didn’t matter that she had gone to court and won. The fact that the case was filed at all was enough to mark her as a risk: what tenant advocates call a Scarlet E — the E standing for eviction, the New York Times reported. Eviction cases are a stubborn blot on any renter’s history. They are nearly impossible to scrub away, even if the tenant made good on obligations or it was only a scare tactic by an aggressive landlord. The pandemic has given the problem new urgency: Although the Biden administration has announced a new eviction moratorium for much of the country through Oct. 3, millions of renters are behind on their payments after more than a year of economic upheaval and could face eventual eviction.

Landlords filed a legal challenge to President Joe Biden’s extension of the coronavirus eviction moratorium until October, saying it goes against a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in July, Bloomberg News reported. The Biden administration’s edict should be struck down because the high court clearly said when it allowed the moratorium to be continued it was relying on an assurance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the agency had no intention of authorizing a further extension, according to a filing late Wednesday in the Atlanta-based federal court of appeals by the Alabama Association of Realtors. The CDC extended a ban on evictions in areas of the country with substantial and high transmission of COVID-19 on Tuesday, after a firestorm of criticism from Democrats following the lapse of a previous moratorium on Saturday. In July, the justices rejected calls by landlords and real-estate trade associations from Alabama and Georgia to block the moratorium while their challenge played out in court. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberals in the majority. Kavanaugh cast the pivotal vote, saying he was letting the ban stay in effect temporarily even though he thought the CDC had exceeded its power.