Big Tech's Big Housing Fix Has Fizzled As Companies Quietly Scale Back Ambitious Plans

When Silicon Valley's tech titans vowed to plunk down huge sums of cash to improve housing affordability in their backyards, optimism was high that the likes of Google, Meta and Apple would help raise billions for thousands of units needed by both the broader community and the companies’ own workers. 

Years later, the results are spotty, and many tech companies are walking away from their proposed efforts even as home prices continue to climb.

Newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom approached tech company heads in 2019 with the idea that there was “no wrong way to support California housing affordability,” according to Newsom's then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jason Elliott.

“Whatever made sense was great, so long as it was real and it was meaningful,” Elliott said.

But by the end of those collaborative talks, there was no overarching agreement on standardized metrics and timelines, and each plan was tailored to individual companies and its goals.

The result: Though some projects have been completed, others remain in limbo, have been scaled back or abandoned altogether. That has left housing advocates and providers with a gap where residential units were meant to be and confusion about what comes next as the economy has grown less certain.

The cities and organizations counting on them have no recourse. 

“The timing couldn’t be worse for private funders of housing solutions to be stepping away when we need them to be stepping up,” said Edie Irons, spokesperson for San Francisco-based All Home, a nonprofit advocate for solutions to homelessness. “That is having a painful impact on the people and organizations that are trying to solve these problems.”

In the past few weeks, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Meta and Google have altered plans or walked away from their commitments to housing projects in the Bay Area and to alleviating a housing crisis they helped exacerbate.

The initiative began with big promises and multiple approaches. Where one company wanted to move quickly, another would take a longer view, sources told Bisnow. And from the get-go, each had very different objectives and resources in hand.

Some, like Google, had significant land holdings. Google made $750M worth of land in the Bay Area available for housing construction.  

Others offered financial tools. Meta partnered with LISC Strategic Investments on a fund that issued below-market-rate loans at 2% interest. 

“The cheaper the capital, the faster it can be deployed, and the more the total development cost goes down,” said Ray Bramson, chief operating officer of Destination: Home, a public-private collaborative that partnered with Meta on its $150M Community Housing Fund in 2020. 

But “providing an alternate debt vehicle wasn’t really transforming the system,” said Ben Metcalf, director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, who was involved in high-level conversations with Meta about establishing a middle-income housing fund. 

“The problem is that none of that stuff was scaled or substantial,” he said.

Then the pandemic threw a major wrench in the gears. Despite some notable successes, the fallout had an overall crushing impact on project feasibility and companies’ appetite for delivering on housing initiatives proposed in a far more optimistic time.

Take Meta, which committed $1B. Only $193M in grants have been fulfilled, and $582M in other commitments have not. The $225M Willow Village project in Menlo Park was supposed to include 1,730 new homes, but no construction has begun, according to Menlo Park planning commission’s May 19 annual review of the development agreement. 

The agreement is nonbinding and doesn’t require Meta to proceed with the project. Yet many of the city benefits are tied to certain milestones, which are lost if Meta doesn’t follow through 

“Not only has Meta backed away from housing production work, but [the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] has pulled back almost all of their housing advocacy grants,” Irons said. “It’s really disappointing to see, especially when their work was really making an impact. Their team was really strong.”

In May, the nonprofit created by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, said it would rescind $50M in funding for housing initiatives.

Google announced a $1B investment in affordable housing in 2019. 

Five years later, the company has entitled 12,900 of a planned 15,000 homes and issued funding enabling construction of 4,800 of 5,000 homes. The company has also distributed $40M of a planned $50M to Bay Area nonprofits, according to its website.

Completed projects include the 93-unit Path Villas in San Jose that opened in January 2024, 89 homes in Sunnyvale that were completed in April 2024, and 100 units in Mountain View that wrapped up in June 2025. 

But Google terminated plans for the 41-acre Landings development in Mountain View in April 2024. The package would have included $44M in community benefits, about half of which are no longer available. The city received $23M cash up front, but the property remains an empty construction site. 

The company’s other Mountain View project, Middlefield Park, is in limbo after Google announced plans to sell the 40-acre property. The master plan had included 1,900 housing units and 800K SF of office space. 

The Mountain View in 2023 city council approved another project, called North Bayshore. Google is still in conversations with the city about that project, a company spokesperson said. 

“The reason we were interested in working with Google was the enormous value in community benefits that would be made available because they were tied to significant office development,” Mountain View Councilman Lucas Ramirez said.

Google is reportedly interviewing residential development teams to purchase the Mountain View land. Should the plan be amended and the office space component removed, it is unclear whether the city would still get the community benefits tied to it. The city’s ability to compel Google to do anything is limited.

There was no written agreement between Google and the city, Ramirez said, and the billion-dollar commitment was never codified.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” Ramirez said. “We would [have included] a provision that says if it doesn't move forward within five years, Google should contribute X.” 

Google began to reassess its downtown San Jose project near the Diridon train station in 2023 when the Valley Transportation Authority extended the timeline for completing a Bay Area Rapid Transit extension to 2036. The transit-oriented development was explicitly tied to delivery of the station, and community benefits were attached. 

In December 2024, Google agreed to give the city $5M out of $200M in community benefits tied to the stalled development on top of an advance payment of $7.5M in 2022. 

Not all tech firms have backed away from their commitments. Apple 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. 

By 2024, the company had established a $50M affordable housing fund with John Sobrato, the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund and Destination: Home. That has enabled a number of projects to move forward. 

“With state and local budgets where they are, and interest rate volatility, and level of uncertainty of other forms of government financing, it’s essential to have permanent funding sources that can come in and replace those,” said Rebecca Foster, executive director at the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund. 

The fund has broken ground on two projects totaling $25M, including 145 units in San Francisco and 120 units in Santa Cruz. There are plans for two additional projects in San Jose that will cost another $25M. 

Amazon has also followed through by launching a $2B housing equity fund in 2021 intended to preserve existing affordable housing and create new stock near its campuses. The effort was so successful that the company added another $1.4B  to the fund in 2024.

Grants have gone toward opening a 160-unit affordable housing project in Seattle and acquiring a 1,000-unit apartment complex in Virginia. 

But for companies like Meta and Google, the pandemic threw timelines into chaos and upended companies’ needs for office space. Economic instability has further jeopardized the financial feasibility of delivering housing. And a chaotic political climate has shifted some companies’ priorities. 

A lack of accountability measures means an uncertain path ahead when it comes to holding companies to their promises. The help offered was significant, and the loss of money, energy and support will have an impact. 

“Every single project matters, and it all adds up,” All Home’s Irons said.

CORRECTION, JUNE 30, 4:25 P.M. PT: A previous version of this story incorrectly named Google's development in Mountain View and the area in which the company provided land for housing projects. It has been updated and further clarifies the status of Google's housing commitment.