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Big Tech Pledged Billions for New Housing. The Results Aren’t Living Up to the Hype.

Google, Meta and Apple have helped fund construction of thousands of new units, but some efforts have slowed

By Nicole Friedman, WSJ

Aug. 11, 2025 9:00 pm ET

Tech giants pledged billions in 2019 to boost affordable housing in Silicon Valley, but progress has been slow.

Tech giants Meta, Google and Apple made headlines when they pledged billions of dollars to make housing more affordable in their Silicon Valley backyards.

Now, six years later, the results haven’t lived up to expectations.

Some projects are going forward. The three companies have helped fund the construction of thousands of affordable units, primarily by providing loans to developers creating new housing.

Other initiatives haven’t gotten off the ground. Meta’s 2019 pledge included $225 million worth of land in Menlo Park, where the company is based. The city approved in 2022 a proposed master plan to develop 59 acres including office space, retail, a hotel and 1,730 housing units.

But further approvals are still needed. A representative for the project declined to give a construction timeline during a May planning commission meeting.

“There was a lot of hype that was created back in 2019, and these big numbers really felt like transformative investments” in the Bay Area, said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “Somehow, that hasn’t worked out that way.”

Despite delays, each company said its pledge amounts haven’t changed.

The uneven progress underscores the challenge of navigating local land-use and permitting rules, which have been a reason for the nation’s yawning housing shortage.

This is especially true in California, which has some of the most burdensome regulations around new-home construction and has only recently started to roll back some of them.

Alphabet’s Google and Meta each committed $1 billion and Apple pledged $2.5 billion for affordable housing in 2019. These actions followed years of tech-related job growth that pushed up housing costs in the Bay Area and criticism that the booming tech sector was partly to blame for housing shortages in Silicon Valley.

The pledges took different forms, but they all included loans to affordable-housing developers. Each company also committed to build affordable housing on company-owned land worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

“The private sector shouldn’t be solely responsible in any way for solving any of these problems,” said Jennifer Loving, chief executive of San Jose nonprofit Destination: Home. But, she added, “their money can be extremely catalytic.”

Google’s commitment included $750 million worth of company-owned land in San Jose, Mountain View and Sunnyvale, where the company planned to help build at least 15,000 homes. Google has approval so far to build 12,900 homes across three mixed-use developments, but it is still talking to developers and construction hasn’t started yet.

Now, Google is exploring a sale of one of these sites, Middlefield Park in Mountain View, because the company’s real estate needs have changed thanks to hybrid work, a spokesperson said. The company said it is looking for buyers that can build housing on the site.

Meta has spent about $200 million of its pledged $1 billion, mostly through a $150 million loan fund for housing for extremely low-income residents.

Tim Cook and Gavin Newsom reviewing a land development plan.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019 discussed the San Jose land that Apple plans to make available for affordable housing. Photo: Apple

“It was something that the market needed, and the funds went pretty fast,” said Lindsay Haddix, who worked on Meta’s affordable-housing team before being laid off in 2022.

Another portion of the pledge was a $250 million partnership with the state government to build housing on state-owned land. Meta hasn’t provided an update on that partnership.

“Meta has made significant investments in affordable housing development, teacher housing, grant funding, housing policy support, land development and modular housing,” a spokesperson said.

Apple has spent the most—more than $1.6 billion as of July 2024, the latest figure available, a spokesperson said. That includes funding to help build or preserve more than 10,000 units of affordable housing, financial support for people at risk of becoming homeless and down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers.

Apple’s pledge also included $300 million in land in San Jose that the company said would be available for affordable housing. Apple hasn’t provided an update on that initiative.

“We’re proud to be working with community partners across the state to increase access to affordable housing,” said Kristina Raspe, Apple’s vice president of global real estate and facilities.

Tech company housing pledges outside of California have moved more swiftly.

Microsoft announced a $500 million commitment for affordable housing in the Seattle area in January 2019, then upped it to $750 million the following year. The company allocated the $750 million as of early 2025, a spokesperson said.

Amazon.com, which committed more than $2 billion in 2021 for affordable housing, said last year that it had provided $2.2 billion and added another $1.4 billion to its pledge. Amazon’s investments are in the Seattle, Arlington, Va., and Nashville, Tenn., regions.