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President Biden is coming under fire from housing advocates who say his administration is turning a blind eye as landlords seek to boot tens of thousands of cash-strapped renters from their homes despite a nationwide eviction freeze, The Hill reported. Tenant rights groups say the Department of Justice (DOJ) has yet to file a single criminal charge for violations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium, which carries penalties of up to $200,000 and a year in jail. “I think it would be helpful if they prosecuted landlords who are violating the law,” said Isaac Sturgill, an attorney at Legal Aid of North Carolina. “From my knowledge, DOJ hasn’t been enforcing the order. It does make it look more like a paper tiger.” Enacted in September as a public health measure, the CDC order aims to mitigate the spread of coronavirus by helping financially distressed tenants remain in their homes, instead of forcing them into homeless shelters or other crowded living spaces. Since then, however, the federal eviction protections have steadily eroded. A catchphrase has even emerged among some tenants’ advocates to sum up the current beleaguered state of the CDC moratorium: “It’s better than nothing.” “It’s getting weaker as time goes on,” Sturgill said. “People are figuring out more and more ways around it, and landlords are getting more and more emboldened to ignore it.” Housing advocates say three developments have primarily undercut the protections: Trump-era guidance that put a thumb on the scale for landlords, a slew of lawsuits against the moratorium and efforts by pro-landlord attorneys to exploit legal loopholes.

Department stores, once a middle-class mainstay of convenience and indulgence, had been spiraling downward long before the pandemic turbocharged online shopping and helped tip a number of big-name retailers into bankruptcy. Nearly 200 department stores have disappeared in the past year alone, and another 800 — or about half the country’s remaining mall-based locations — are expected to shutter by the end of 2025, according to commercial real estate firm Green Street Advisors, the Washington Post reported. Those closures, analysts say, will have a cascading effect on American shopping malls, which already are battling record-high vacancy rates and precipitous drops in foot traffic, as well as on the commercial real estate market and the broader economy. The pandemic set off an economic chain reaction that rippled through the country’s department store chains, forcing several into chapter 11 proceedings. Neiman Marcus, Stage Stores and J.C. Penney filed for bankruptcy last May, followed by Lord & Taylor and, most recently, Belk in February. Even companies on relatively stable footing, like Macy’s, are shuttering dozens of stores as they try to move away from traditional shopping malls. Overall sales at department stores plunged more than 40 percent at the beginning of the pandemic and have yet to make up for lost ground, according to Commerce Department data, as Americans do more of their shopping online and gravitate to specialty brands and discount chains. 

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.

A wave of foreclosures and evictions threatens to arrive when pandemic-related pauses expire later this year, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is considering restrictions on mortgage servicers that would spread the hit into 2022, the New York Times reported. More than 3 million households are behind on their mortgage payments, and nearly 1.7 million will run out their forbearance periods in September, according to the bureau. “We are at really an unusual point in history,” said Diane Thompson, a senior adviser at the bureau. “I don’t think anybody has ever before seen this many mortgages in forbearance at one time that are expected to exit at one time.” So the bureau has come up with a proposal to ensure that homeowners don’t go straight from forbearance to foreclosure. The agency proposed a new rule that would prevent servicers from starting foreclosure proceedings until after Dec. 31. The intent, bureau officials said, is to give borrowers coming off forbearance time to consider their options, such as whether they need a mortgage modification to reduce their monthly payments. The restriction would apply only to mortgages on homes used as primary residences. The agency also proposed a rule change that would allow servicers to extend loan modification offers to borrowers experiencing a COVID-related hardship without undertaking the full review normally required to adjust a mortgage. The intention is to let lenders quickly offer borrowers more affordable terms, so long as the change does not increase the borrower’s monthly payment or extend the loan’s term by more than 40 years.

Big companies are making plans to stick with city-center office buildings, but they are cutting back on space and driving down rent prices for years to come, according to an analysis of U.S. office leasing trends prepared for The Wall Street Journal. Landlord and tenant discussions in seven of the largest office markets offer an early glimpse into the evolving workplace strategies for hundreds of companies after a year of largely remote work. Rent proposals made during the first quarter suggest that many companies in the biggest markets — including New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles — are embracing an emerging hybrid model: maintaining a shrunken office presence while allowing employees to work remotely at least part-time. The terms under negotiation show landlords are offering long-term leases of four and more years at discounts up to 13% below rent rates reached in the first quarter of 2020 when factoring in concessions like periods of free rent, according to VTS. Companies are also seeking on average about 10% less space than they were looking for in the first quarter of 2020.

The amount of office space available in Manhattan is at the highest level in at least 30 years, Bloomberg News reported. The availability rate jumped to 17.2% in the first quarter, according to a report Thursday by Savills. Much of that was driven by a surge in sublease space, which reached 22 million square feet (2 million square meters), 62% higher than before the pandemic, the real estate services firm said. “Abundant short- and long-term options are driving price reductions,” Savills said in the report. “Many owners are proposing historically aggressive rates, concessions and flexibility to secure tenants amid so much competition.” New York’s office market has taken a hit from a pandemic that has kept many workers home for months. A year after the city shut down, vaccines are raising hopes for a return to the office. The tenants actively looking for space in the market are seeking deals. Asking rents fell for the fifth straight quarter to $76.27 a square foot, down 9% from a year earlier, with growing competition from cheaper subleases. Concessions for long-term leases at newer office buildings also rose: Average tenant improvement allowances jumped 16% and free rent surged 17% to an average of 13.5 months. The tenant-friendly market is expected to last for at least the next 12 to 18 months, Savills said.