Housing Fund Backed By Apple, Other Bay Area Heavyweights Doubled To $100M

The Housing Accelerator Fund has doubled the size of its Bay Area Housing Innovation Fund to $100M, giving a fresh jolt to the effort to speed up and de-risk affordable housing production. 

Launched in 2024 with backing from Apple, Sobrato Philanthropies, Destination: Home and HAF, the fund aims to address the financing uncertainty gumming up the works in affordable housing development.

“The necessary solution to really make a dent in this crisis will be finding ways that we can all work together, and that's the full spectrum,” Sobrato Organization Managing Director of Impact Investments Victoria Fram said in a statement. “We need public sources. We need private sources. We need corporates. We need groups like us that have blended capital.” 

The $50M infusion comes as the Bay Area continues to struggle with some of the nation’s longest development timelines and highest per-unit costs. The expanded fund is now projected to help unlock more than 1,000 affordable homes over the next two years.

“Our really big focus with creating the innovation fund was trying to create a scalable financing vehicle that could provide developers with reliable, committed construction-to-permanent capital that could replace what is otherwise a competitive public resource,” Housing Accelerator Fund CEO Rebecca Foster said.

Most Bay Area affordable housing projects spend years chasing multiple competitive public sources, a process that often inflates timelines to nearly a decade and pushes costs toward $1M per unit.

“Upfront financing is what makes those sites possible” said Chelsea Muller, director of communications at Destination: Home. “You provide a little skin in the game and allow a developer just the breath to explore what is even possible.”

The fund offers fast, flexible first-mortgage and second-position loans designed to give developers certainty in exchange for clear cost and schedule targets. 

“Oftentimes, affordable housing developers are waiting round after round for funding and to line up all of the resources that they need to be able to move a project forward,” Foster said. “That makes it a lot harder for them to innovate.”

The fund’s first project, Mercy Housing’s 1633 Valencia St., is set to move its first residents in after the holidays, following a 19-month construction period, delivering 145 homes for formerly homeless seniors at $525K per unit. A second development, Harvey West Studios in Santa Cruz, broke ground in 2024 and is on track to become the county’s largest permanent supportive housing community when it opens in 2026.

“When we first launched the innovation fund and we put out requests for projects, a pipeline of applications, we far outstripped the initial $50M of capacity that we had,” Foster said.

With access to a reliable source of funds, HAF has streamlined the process by working with the same team of architects, construction firms and developers, iterating on what has worked in the past and front-loading design work. 

“Being able to know for sure that they were going to have all the funding sources they needed and they could lock in that construction start date that far in advance, there's a ripple impact that goes back to the beginning of the project. Everything lines up much more seamlessly,” Foster said. 

Building on the momentum from its first two projects, HAF secured new commitments from the Valhalla Foundation, The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, and philanthropists Saikat Chakrabarti and Leah and Ben Spero, in addition to Apple.

In October, Apple committed to a major investment in Housing Trust Silicon Valley’s $200M affordable housing initiative. That initiative targets the creation and preservation of about 7,400 affordable homes across the Bay Area. According to Housing Trust Silicon Valley, that fund could generate $5.7M in annual rent savings for low-income households and promote sustainability by backing housing near jobs and transit.

Apple previously announced a $2.5B plan in 2019 that included a $1B affordable housing investment fund, a $1B first-time homebuyer mortgage assistance fund and $300M of Apple-owned land in San Jose set aside for affordable housing. 

Among the next wave of projects in the Housing Accelerator Fund’s pipeline is a 195-unit development at the Berryessa BART station in North San Jose.

Additional developments in Alameda, San Mateo and San Francisco counties are in the works. The Bay Area is racing to meet state-mandated housing quotas under the Regional Housing Needs Allocation process, which requires all local governments to adequately plan to meet housing needs. 

“I think there has been a narrative based on experience that we can't deliver affordable housing as fast as we need to address our crisis and leverage public resources as efficiently as possible,” Foster said. “And we totally can, and we're doing it in these projects.”