Meta promised $1 billion for affordable housing. Then it quietly walked away

Miami Herald

22-05-2025

In 2019, Meta unveiled an ambitious pledge to spend $1 billion to help ease California's affordable housing crisis that critics say the company, with its thousands of highly paid employees, played a role in exacerbating.
Yet not even halfway through its 10-year commitment, Facebook's parent company has largely abandoned its work on the initiative. Its small staff is gone. The program, while never formally canceled, is a shadow of the operation it once was, according to three people with knowledge of Meta's decision-making who requested anonymity out of fear for professional repercussions.
The initiative ran in earnest for a few years, but then, in November 2022, after having pledged $225 million in land and allocating $193 million out of the proposed $775 million to fund new construction, executive leadership ended the funding that went directly to building affordable housing, the sources say.
Over the next year, the tech giant's housing team withered to a one-person operation focused on research and small grants. Then, in 2023, that employee was laid off, too.
Meta denied on Monday that it has pulled back from its housing work, and says that it will continue to invest in housing over the initiative's lifespan through 2029. But the sources and documents reviewed by this news organization suggest they've made little progress since the end of 2022.
"As an active partner in addressing the region's housing shortage, Meta has made significant investments in affordable housing development, teacher housing, grant funding, housing policy support, land development and modular housing," said Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton. "There is still much work ahead, but we are proud to join individuals and organizations who started working on these issues long before Meta existed."
Work on Meta's housing projects has been reassigned to other Meta employees and outside consultants, the company said.
But if work has continued since 2022, it's been slow. The initiative's 2024 annual impact report is almost entirely copied and pasted from from 2023, offering a near-verbatim repetition of prior accomplishments, according to internal documents reviewed by this news organization. A few small changes are noted, such as recognizing the completion of the "Good to be Home" branding campaign, and that it had hosted a total of 13 webinars that year with nonprofit and local government partners, a jump from nine the year before.
The shuttering of the housing team appears to reflect the changing corporate culture within Meta, where the focus has shifted to building goodwill with the new presidential administration, rather than the public.
Meta's early investments had been promising. Its $150 million Community Housing Fund made low-interest loans to affordable housing developers, funding 1,500 units for extremely low-income residents. That money is now nearly spent.
"It was a resounding success," said Ray Bramson, chief operating officer of Destination: Home, a San Jose nonprofit aimed at ending homelessness, which partnered with Meta on the fund.
There were also supposed to be two more funds, according to its 2019 announcement. A $250 million effort to finance mixed-income housing on surplus state land throughout California was in the works when Meta pulled funding, the three sources told the Bay Area News Group.
Another $350 million was categorized in the initiative's announcement as "TBD" to be deployed based on how effective early investments proved. Some of that money, $15 million, was invested in Factory_OS, a modular housing manufacturer in Vallejo that Meta hoped would help scale affordable housing construction. But by June 2024, Factory_OS was struggling, and its manufacturing plant and brand were sold to a private equity buyer.
Some elements of the original commitment remain, including Meta's pledge to build on $225 million worth of land it had acquired in Menlo Park, where it has its global headquarters. The site, called Willow Village, is expected to one day include 1,730 homes about 300 of which would be affordable. The Menlo Park City Council approved the plans in 2022, but new roads, a power station and a fire station must be built before any housing goes in. Meta, which was supposed to be responsible for the build out, has not identified a construction timetable, a spokeswoman for the city said.
Meta also donated $25 million to fund 110 units of teacher housing in Palo Alto, set to open later this year. And it made a number of smaller pandemic-era grants for rental assistance and homelessness work to Bay Area cities and nonprofits.
But now, as Meta pours its energy into policy work in Washington, D.C., rather than Menlo Park, housing advocates here worry they'll have to look for new patrons.
"It's critically important that partners like Meta stay at the table right now," said Bramson of Destination: Home. "Corporate investment in housing is important now, because all of our other sources are drying up."
Meta's 2019 commitment came at a time when the company was facing criticism over its influence on both local and national fronts. The company was still sweeping up the mess of its 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal in which a political data firm was found to have acquired tens of millions of users' data without their authorization.
Meanwhile, in the Bay Area, tech was blamed for growing inequality. Protesters were vandalizing buses of commuting tech workers. Candlelight vigils mourned neighborhoods lost to gentrification.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, newly elected and looking to show off his political chops, was publicly pressuring those who had profited from the tech boom to help impacted communities. On the campaign trail, Newsom had promised to build 3.5 million new homes in California by 2025. The state remains far behind its construction goals, and meanwhile home prices and rents keep climbing.
Tech companies had their own motivations to consider - high housing costs meant employees expected higher salaries, constraining companies' ability to grow their employee base here.
In 2016, Meta - then known as Facebook - pledged nearly $30 million fund to affordable housing, as part of its negotiations with Menlo Park to expand its footprint there. Elliot Schrage, Meta's former policy chief, wanted to do something bigger, and drove the $1 billion initiative. Schrage did not respond to a request for comment.
Meta's affordable housing pledge was just one of many in what had become a sort of atonement arms race among tech companies. Microsoft committed $500 million to housing in Seattle. Then Google outdid them, offering up $1 billion. Meta's announcement came a few months later.
But the new housing team realized the difficulty of doing mission-driven work within a company calibrated to seek profits, the three sources said. All funding went through the company's finance department, which resisted spending on projects whose returns on investment might not be realized for decades, let alone the next quarter, the sources said.
The program also lost what champions it had within senior leadership. In 2018, Schrage, a confidant to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg, stepped down from his role in executive leadership (though he continued to work on special projects after). Another advocate, CFO Dave Wehner, who had overseen the housing team, stepped down in 2022, and could no longer shield it from the finance team's scrutiny. Wehner did not respond to a request for comment.
By 2022, Meta was under new pressure - having hemorrhaged money on its pivot to the metaverse and augmented reality, the company laid off 11,000 workers. Budgets shrank. Priorities changed. And the housing initiative - never core to the business - was among the casualties.
Though their work was cut short, former employees and nonprofit partners told the Bay Area News Group that Meta's team had positive impacts on housing affordability in the Bay Area.
"I am extremely proud of the innovation and impact we were able to have during my three years on Facebook's Housing Initiative Team," said Lindsay Haddix, who was one of the initiative's first employees, and was laid off in November 2022. "It felt like we were really gaining momentum."
Now, she leads East Bay Housing Organizations, an affordable housing advocacy nonprofit that formerly received grants from Meta. She's worried about where they'll turn for funding, especially now that Mark Zuckerberg's philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, has also retreated from the housing space and public funds are drying up.
"Their money helped make real progress in solving the housing crisis," Haddix said, "and I'd love for Meta to consider reviving its commitment to this work."
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