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Apple’s Commitment to California


According to USA Today, California is home to 17 of the 25 least affordable housing markets in our country. From San Francisco to Los Angeles, our state has overtime become unliveable for many residents who have, for many years, called it home. With a general consensus that our country is nearing an economic downturn, the issue of lack of housing availability and affordability has become paramount, and something needs to be done to address these ever growing problems.

On September 25, 2019, Professional Engineer Charles Marohn released a book entitled Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild America Prosperity, a study of urban development as it relates to our country. While reading an article on TechCrunch about the book, I realized just how big a role our state government’s appropriation of funds plays in the issue. In his review of Marohn’s book, author of the article Danny Crichton says, “Cities — armed with economic development dollars and consultants galore — focus their energies and budgets on new housing subdivisions as well as far-flung, auto-dependent office parks and strip malls, all the while ignoring the long-term debt, maintenance costs, and municipal burdens they are transferring to future generations of residents.” Furthermore, Marohn says in his book, “The growth creates an illusion of wealth, a broad, cultural misperception that the growing community is become [sic] stronger and more prosperous. Instead, with each new development, they become increasingly more insolvent.” With our state government making bad decisions of how to use funds for urban development, it may take more than government policy reform to fix these issues. Obviously we could say our government should judge urban development projects based on how much social impact they bring to society, but we see time and time again governments failing in their pursuit of economic prosperity. Perhaps this has contributed to the impending recession we may face in the coming year or so; we’re spending too much on aesthetic changes to communities that need true repair, not just a facelift.

So if the government is failing us, perhaps we can look to large corporations for some sort of remedy. Take Apple, for example, who is partnering with the state of California to fight not only housing affordability and availability, but also homelessness, an issue that has plagued our state for many years. On November 4th the company announced a $2.5B commitment to fight housing related problems in California.

Let’s break this down. $1B will be appropriated to an affordable housing investment fund. This will essentially act as a line of credit for our state to build new affordable housing developments not only faster, but at a lower cost. Another $1B will be used for a “homebuyer mortgage assistance fund” specifically to help first responders, school employees, and veterans purchase their first home. The remaining $500M will be split between a “Bay Area housing fund” (forgivable loans and grants for the development of affordable housing in NorCal), a donation to Destination: Home (an organization dedicated to fighting the homelessness epidemic in Silicon Valley), and $300M worth of land owned by Apple which will be used for even more affordable housing initiatives.

To me, this sounds incredible — especially with all of the bad press surrounding tech giants in this day and age. Governor Newsom seems to share the same sentiment: “This unparalleled financial commitment to affordable housing, and the innovative strategies at the heart of this initiative, are proof that Apple is serious about solving this issue. I hope other companies follow their lead . . . The sky-high cost of housing — both for homeowners and renters — is the defining quality-of-life concern for millions of families across this state, one that can only be fixed by building more housing. This partnership with Apple will allow the state of California to do just that.” With Apple partnering with Gov. Newsom, I hope to see some great synergies arise as it relates to our housing market and the availability of housing. Though Marohn argued that state governments could not ameliorate these types of issues on their own, perhaps the combined effort of corporate america and its governing body will yield positive results moving forward.

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