By EDITH M. LEDERER (Associated Press)

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations appealed for $2.8 billion on Tuesday to provide desperately needed aid to 3 million Palestinians, stressing that tackling looming famine in war-torn Gaza requires not only food but sanitation, water and health facilities.

Andrea De Domenico, the head of the U.N. humanitarian office for Gaza and the West Bank, told reporters that “massive operations” are required to restore those services and meet minimum standards — and this can’t be done during military operations.

He pointed to the destruction of hospitals, water and sanitation facilities, homes, roads and schools, adding that “there is not a single university that is standing in Gaza.”

De Domenico said Israel’s recently-ended second major military operation at Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, was so destructive the facility has been forced to shut down. As an example, he questioned what the military objective was in shooting an MRI scanner that examines parts of the body and can detect cancers.

He said his team has been dealing with “a scene of terror” at the hospital, with U.N. and Palestinian colleagues helping people try to recognize family members from shoes or clothes on “the remnants of corpses.”

Israel promised to open more border crossings into Gaza and increase the flow of aid into Gaza after its drone strikes killed seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen who were delivering food into the territory on April 1.

The killings were condemned by Israel’s closest allies and heightened criticism of Israel’s conduct in the 6-month-old war with Hamas, sparked by the extremist group’s surprise attack in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and led some 250 others to be taken hostage. The Israeli offensive in Gaza aimed at destroying Hamas has caused widespread devastation and killed over 33,800 people, according to local health officials.

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

De Domenico said there are signs of Israel’s “good intention” to get more humanitarian assistance into Gaza, citing the opening of a crossing to the north, which faces the most serious threat of famine, and the opening of bakeries there.

But the U.N. keeps pushing Israel to do more, he said.

De Domenico pointed to Israeli denials and delays on U.N. requests for aid convoys to enter Gaza.

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He said 41% of U.N. requests that required going through Israeli checkpoints were denied during the week from April 6-12, and last week a convoy from the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the U.N. World Food Program was caught in crossfire in an area that was supposed to be safe.

De Domenico said convoys often spend hours at checkpoints and are only cleared in the afternoon, too late to make deliveries and return safely in daylight hours. He said the Israelis know this is how the U.N. operates, and delays allow them to say “we’re not blindly denying you” while controlling what happens.

“We continue to engage with them and our objective is really to solve the issue and deliver aid,” he said.

According to the international community’s authority on determining the severity of hunger crises, famine is imminent in northern Gaza where 70% of people are experiencing catastrophic hunger. And its recent report warned that escalating the war could push half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people to the brink of starvation.

De Domenico said the U.N. appeal was scaled back from $4 billion because of difficulties in getting aid into Gaza — and most importantly getting it to the people who need it most.

He said 90% of the $2.8 billion being sought for the rest of the year is for Gaza and 10% is for the West Bank, which has seen an upsurge in violence and settler attacks.

The latest example of Minnesota United’s newly contrasting responses to Emanuel Reynoso’s most-recent unexcused absence came from club captain Michael Boxall on Tuesday.

“I think we’ve all kind of moved on,” Boxall told the Pioneer Press. “I don’t even know if anyone actually knows what the situation is. I think he’s made decisions that kind of shows everyone around here that he doesn’t care too much about the club.

“So, at some point, you have to take him at face value,” Boxall continued. “I know the owners have invested a lot into the guy, so they need to do what is in their best interest, but in terms of us on the playing field, we just got to move on as if he’s not here — because he hasn’t been for a long time.”

Reynoso traveled from Minnesota to Argentina for a team-approved meeting to obtain his U.S. green card on March 25, but he didn’t attend the meeting and has remained in his native country into this week.

When Reynoso went missing in action for the opening five months of the 2023 season, Loons leaders and players took wait-and-see approaches with their star attacking midfielder.

Now, MNUFC is striking a harder line, with Chief Soccer Officer Khaled El-Ahmad’s statement on Reynoso’s situation last week including this last line: “Our entire focus on on the players and staff who are here.”

Rosales responds

Loons left back Joseph Rosales didn’t like referee Mark Allatin’s decision to book him with a second yellow card in the 1-1 draw with Real Salt Lake on April 6, but he had to swallow it with a one-game suspension in the 2-1 loss to Houston.

Before a corner kick, Rosales made slight contact with Emeka Eneli as they were battling for position, and Eneli fell to the ground too easily.

“Honestly, I don’t like to comment on that,” Rosales said via a translation from Marleine Calderon on Tuesday. “We know the referee made his decision. For me, it wasn’t yellow. Those types of situations in the box happen everywhere, but hey, it’s the referee who makes the decision, and I have no choice but to accept it. Next time, I know that I shouldn’t do those types of things because they are going to be there looking at any situation.”

After Eneli got off the ground, Loons midfielder Robin Lod went up to the RSL midfielder with a knowing smirk.

Rosales is eligible to return when the Loons play at Charlotte FC at 5 p.m. Sunday.

Briefly

Center backs Micky Tapias (hamstring) and Hugo Bacharach (unknown) didn’t train with the first team on Tuesday. Coach Eric Ramsay said Tapias had returned to training Monday before suffering a setback. Ramsay said both players’ injuries were “minor” and hoped they could return later this week. … Winger Sang Bin Jeong is with South Korea for the Under-23 Asian Cup. His team won Tuesday and will finish its group stage on Friday and Monday. If they advance to the knockout rounds, Jeong might be away until after the final in Qatar on May 3. The Loons play Sporting Kansas City on April 27 and Atlanta United on May 4. At least the top three teams in the tournament qualify for the Summer Olympics in Paris from July 26-Aug. 11. The Loons will play in the Leagues Cup against Seattle Sounders on July 26 and Club Necaxa on July 30. … Michigan Stars lost 1-0 to Detroit City in the U.S Open Cup third round on Tuesday. Michigan knocked MNUFC2 out of the national tournament on April 2.

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Viewed in isolation, a proposal to exempt small residential portfolios from new eviction protections could exclude hundreds of thousands of New York City apartments. Perhaps more significantly, this type of estimate isn’t easy to make.

Chris Janaro

Tenant organizers with the Housing Justice for All Coalition rallying at the Capitol building in Albany on March 19, 2024.

How many apartments does your landlord own?

You may not know off the top of your head, but the answer could determine your eligibility for new eviction protections under a broad state housing deal, the specifics of which are still being hammered out.

On Monday evening, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the “parameters of a conceptual agreement” for her $237 billion budget for the coming fiscal year, including a housing plan she said will spur development and “extend protections to tenants in New York that have never been available before.”

As City Limits previously reported, the latter will be some type of defense against eviction without a designated “good cause,” albeit with more carve-outs than the legislation tenant advocates have been pushing since 2019. For example, on Monday Hochul referenced “protecting the very small landlords” in the deal. 

Covered tenants will likely be able to defend against eviction so long as they keep up with rent and comply with their lease terms, and challenge rent increases above a certain threshold.

One proposal on the table as of Tuesday would exclude buildings in certain smaller real estate portfolios, according to three sources privy to the negotiations. Thresholds up for discussion include 10 or fewer units and eight or fewer units. (Hochul’s office and Senate and Assembly leaders did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) 

Looking at these possibilities in isolation, a City Limits analysis estimates a portfolio exemption could exclude hundreds of thousands of New York City apartments from new tenant protections. 

According to data on portfolio size from the nonprofit group JustFix’s Who Owns What tool, as much as 17 percent of the city’s roughly 1.4 million market rate rentals could be exempted under the portfolio size standard alone. Those estimates exclude rent stabilized units that already have stronger tenant protections, as well as an unknown number of small owner-occupied properties that are not required to register with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).

The average renter household in New York City has 2.5 people, meaning a carve out of over 250,000 units could exclude over half a million tenants in the five boroughs alone.

The data on portfolios is complicated to compile, and has some limitations, JustFix warned. Not all city rental properties are required to register with HPD and most of the information is self-reported by landlords. 

The possibility of a portfolio exemption also raises a slew of enforcement questions, according to tenant advocates and real estate industry observers. Landlords can mask their identities behind limited liability companies (LLCs), making the true scope of their holdings difficult to discern. 

“It can take a significant amount of technical and subject-matter expertise,” said Maxwell Austensen, a software engineer at JustFix. “We made Who Owns What to help automate this work, which historically could take days, if not longer, to do manually for each portfolio. But there’s still no publicly provided, official source of truth.”

It remains to be seen if owners will be under some obligation to disclose information to their tenants regarding their good cause eligibility. 

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie did not explicitly discuss a portfolio exemption in remarks to reporters Tuesday, though he alluded to a unique set of parameters outside of New York City, including pertaining to portfolio size. 

He also said that “we want tenants to know whether they are living in a household that would be covered under tenant protections or not” and “that’s one of the language things we’re trying to figure out.” 

Judith Goldiner, attorney in charge of the Civil Law Reform Unit at the Legal Aid Society, offered some suggestions for a disclosure rule, saying landlords should have to tell tenants the names behind their building’s LLC, and how many units each affiliated person owns.

“You should know when you lease up, you should know when your landlord sends a notice for eviction, and your landlord should have to prove that [you’re not covered] when they bring you to court,” she said. 

But while a disclosure requirement would be welcome, a portfolio exemption would still “incentivize landlords to reduce the perceived scale of their portfolio,” Austensen of JustFix said. 

A recent analysis by the good government group Reinvent Albany offers a sense of the prevalence of LLC ownership around the state, though not limited to residential properties. Over a third of properties in Manhattan are LLC-owned, the group found, far outpacing the rest of the city. 

Across Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers, the average LLC ownership rate is 11 percent. Outside of New York City, open data can be harder to come by, according to JustFix, making it difficult to connect properties and LLCs across the state. 

New York’s brand new LLC Transparency Act would have helped renters discover who controls a given LLC—the so-called “beneficial owners”—through a publicly-searchable database. 

But Hochul signed the act into law in December on the condition that the database be private, accessible only to law enforcement or government agencies, or through court order. The bill “required changes to ensure it serves the core purpose of exposing unlawful activity while balancing personal privacy,” she wrote in a memo at the time. 

Brooklyn Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, who sponsored the legislation, told City Limits Tuesday that the private database will make it “much more arduous” for tenants to investigate their landlord’s portfolio size. 

But Gallagher also expressed hope that it will still be useful, particularly if lawmakers commit to being proactive on their constituents’ behalf, making database requests to the Department of State and alerting the attorney general. The law isn’t set to take effect until January 2026, but Gallagher is pushing to get that date moved up. 

“The Department of State is going to have to learn to give that information really rapidly, but it’s all achievable and I think it will help navigate this,” she said.

The law also includes steeper penalties than initially proposed—up to $500 per day in fines for late disclosures and authority for the attorney general to dissolve entities that don’t comply. 

“It’s going to be better than the status quo,” Gallagher said. 

But Mike McKee, treasurer of Tenants PAC and a longtime proponent of the good cause bill as initially written, was skeptical. “If you want to make something unenforceable then make it complicated and make it byzantine,” he said Tuesday. 

A portfolio exemption could even be difficult for landlords to understand, according to Ben Carlos Thypin, CEO of the real estate brokerage Quantierra. For example, there will have to be clear guidance on how to count units in which landlords have partial ownership. 

“It seems hard to imagine that this bill will take into account all of these potential edge cases in terms of how the threshold is calculated,” he said. 

Thypin has done his own rough analysis of New York City apartments potentially covered by good cause, using his company’s proprietary database. He assumed an exemption of portfolios with 10 or fewer units, as well as apartments built since 2009 and those above a high-rent threshold, based on proposals City & State previously reported. 

A version of good cause with these exemptions would cover about 400,000 apartments or a little over a third of the city’s unregulated housing stock, Thypin said, stressing that the figure could change depending how final negotiations shake out. 

If the portfolio exemption comes to fruition, he added, this could cue up a good test of the LLC Transparency Act, and the allowed disclosures to government agencies. 

“Absent some system that the state comes out with to tell people whether a building is covered by good cause eviction, I think the net result is discouraging use of the law,” he said.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Emma@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

By TOM KRISHER and MICHELLE CHAPMAN (Associated Press)

DETROIT (AP) — Tesla will ask shareholders to reinstate a $56 billion compensation package for CEO Elon Musk that was rejected by a judge in Delaware this year, and to move the electric car maker’s corporate home from Delaware to Texas.

In a filing with federal regulators early Wednesday, the company said it would ask shareholders to vote on both issues during its annual meeting on June 13.

In January, Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick ruled that Musk is not entitled to a landmark compensation package awarded by Tesla’s board of directors that is potentially worth about $55.8 billion over 10 years starting in 2018.

Five years ago, a Tesla shareholder lawsuit alleged that the pay package should be voided because it was dictated by Musk and was the product of sham negotiations with directors who were not independent of him.

Musk said a month after the judge’s ruling that he would try to move Tesla’s corporate listing to Texas, where he has already moved company headquarters.

Almost immediately after the judge’s ruling, Musk did exactly that with Neuralink, his privately held brain implant company, moving its corporate home from Delaware to Nevada.

In a letter to shareholders this week, Chairperson Robyn Denholm said that Musk has delivered on the growth it was looking for at the automaker, with Tesla meeting all of the stock value and operational targets in a 2018 CEO pay package that was approved by shareholders.

“Because the Delaware Court second-guessed your decision, Elon has not been paid for any of his work for Tesla for the past six years that has helped to generate significant growth and stockholder value,” Denholm wrote. “That strikes us — and the many stockholders from whom we already have heard — as fundamentally unfair, and inconsistent with the will of the stockholders who voted for it.”

Tesla posted record deliveries of more than 1.8 million electric vehicles worldwide in 2023, according to a regulatory filing. But the value its shares has eroded quickly this year as sales of electric vehicles soften.

Future growth is in doubt and it may be a challenge to get shareholders to back a fat pay package in an environment where competition has increased worldwide and demand for electric vehicle sales is fading.

Tesla’s shares have lost more than one third of their value this year as massive price cuts have failed to draw more buyers. The company said it delivered 386,810 vehicles from January through March, nearly 9% fewer than it sold in the same period last year.

Shareholders also will be asked to cast a nonbinding advisory vote on 2023 executive compensation.

But the proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission does not address Musk’s demand to own 25% of Tesla shares for him to pursue artificial intelligence and robotics at the company. At present he owns 20.5% of the company.

In January Musk challenged the Tesla board in a post on X, the social media platform he now owns, to come up with a new compensation package. Unless he gets 25%, he wrote that he’d prefer to build products outside of Tesla, apparently with another company.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who is normally bullish on Tesla, said in an interview that the filing doesn’t address multiple issues including Musk’s future compensation.

“It’s the elephant in the room because Musk has threatened over X, and it’s been a massive overhang” for Tesla stock, Ives said.

Musk, he said, needs to commit to being Tesla CEO for three to five years and developing artificial intelligence with the company. When the company announces first-quarter earnings next week, Musk needs to spell out plans for future growth, including the status of the Model 2, a small EV that costs about $25,000, Ives said. Otherwise, dark days lie ahead, he said.

“Investors are not just taking Musk’s word,” he said. “There’s a feeling like the plane is crashing into the ocean and the board is focused on their own salted peanuts.”

Musk has less leverage than he did in January because of this year’s stock slide. “He went from Cinderella story to the Nightmare on Elm Street in a matter of six months,” Ives said.

At the time of the Delaware court ruling, Musk’s package was worth more than $55.8 billion, but the court may have cost the mercurial CEO over $10 billion due to the company’s stock slide this year. The filing said Musk’s 2018 compensation was worth $44.9 billion at the close of trading on April 12.

Since last year, Tesla has cut prices as much as $20,000 on some models. The price cuts caused used electric vehicle values to drop and clipped Tesla’s profit margins.

This week, Tesla said it was letting about 10% of its workers go, about 14,000 people.

In the filing, Tesla’s board wrote that the decision to seek shareholder approval of Musk’s 2018 pay package was made by the board after it received a report from a special committee of one board member, Kathleen Wilson-Thompson.

The board wrote that if there is any significant vote against future executive pay packages, “we will consider our stockholders’ concerns, and the compensation committee will evaluate whether any actions are necessary to address those concerns.”

Shares of Tesla Inc., which slid another 8% this week, fell about 1% Wednesday.

____

Chapman reported from New York. This story has been corrected to explain that shareholder voting on future executive compensation is advisory only.