Tech Giants Pledge Billions for Housing, but Will It Matter?
SAN FRANCISCO — A mile from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino lies the sun-faded carcass of the Vallco Shopping Mall. At the moment it consists of empty, buff-colored buildings, acres of black asphalt and a pile of rubble where the parking garage used to be.
About a year ago, a developer submitted a proposal to build 2,400 apartments on the site, half of them subsidized to put rents below the market rate. The city approved the plan reluctantly, and afterward a community group sued. The project is stuck in court.
Stories like that hang heavy over Apple’s $2.5 billion plan, announced Monday, to help solve the dire shortage of affordable housing that has come to dominate life and politics in the most populous state. The pledge came weeks after Facebook announced $1 billion for a similar program, and months after Google did the same.
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But don’t expect the money to make much of a difference. A few billion dollars doesn’t buy a lot in California’s punitively expensive housing market. Even if it did, the companies’ announcements were accompanied by crucial yet mostly unanswered questions like where, how and when this money will be spent. And as the Vallco struggle illustrates, the biggest question is the one California has long wrestled with: how to get much-needed housing built when local governments and homeowners do everything they can to prevent it.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/tech-giants-pledge-billions-for-housing-but-will-it-matter/ar-AAJWqTZ
Question to those living in the Bay Area. Are lawsuits against projects like this a common occurrence?
