Title: Meta’s Broken Promise: How a $10000000000000000000 Housing Pledge Disappeared Into Thin Air

In 2019, Meta, still widely recognized by its former name Facebook, unveiled one of its boldest non-tech initiatives ever—a $1 billion commitment to solving California’s worsening affordable housing crisis.

The announcement came at a time when the company was facing mounting criticism for its role in skyrocketing housing costs across Silicon Valley, driven in part by the influx of its own well-paid employees who transformed sleepy towns into high-rent tech enclaves.

The pledge sounded revolutionary. Meta would invest in land, finance new housing projects, and work with local governments to construct thousands of affordable units across the Bay Area.

It was, for a moment, a corporate atonement that suggested Silicon Valley might begin to take responsibility for the problems it had helped create.

But now, just six years into its ten-year pledge, Meta’s grand plan appears to have been quietly swept under the rug. There was no formal announcement of the initiative’s cancellation, no press release or blog post admitting a pivot.

Instead, the housing program slowly faded from the spotlight, its staff reassigned or laid off, its funds quietly reabsorbed into the company’s broader budget.

By the end of 2022, according to three sources close to the matter, Meta had already ended the bulk of its direct funding for affordable housing construction.

The company had pledged $775 million in cash as part of its initiative, but just $193 million had actually been allocated when the financial faucet was turned off.

Meta continues to claim that it is committed to the housing initiative, pointing to ongoing partnerships and small-scale grants. But insiders say the actual work has essentially ceased, reduced to occasional research projects and now-defunct branding campaigns with titles like “Good to be Home.”

Once boasting a dedicated team focused exclusively on housing issues, Meta’s initiative is now managed in fragmented pieces by other departments, often outsourced to consultants or folded into broader policy efforts in Washington, D.C.

By 2023, the last full-time employee on the housing team was laid off, marking the end of any serious internal focus on the project.

Publicly, Meta maintains that the work is ongoing and that the initiative is still on track to run through 2029. But internal documents suggest otherwise. A 2024 report summarizing the initiative’s achievements appears to have been largely recycled from the previous year, with only minor edits noting an increase in webinars and the conclusion of a marketing campaign.

Observers note that Meta’s pivot away from housing coincides with a larger cultural shift inside the company. The once-ambitious corporate citizenship ideals have been replaced with a narrower focus on federal lobbying, political alignment, and the company’s floundering investment in the metaverse.

Meta’s early contributions, to be fair, did yield tangible results. The $150 million Community Housing Fund disbursed low-interest loans to affordable housing developers, facilitating construction of approximately 1,500 units for extremely low-income residents.

That fund is now nearly exhausted. No successor fund has been launched. And other planned investments, including a $250 million mixed-income housing effort on state land, were abruptly abandoned, according to sources familiar with Meta’s internal deliberations.

One of the initiative’s marquee partnerships involved Factory_OS, a modular housing startup in Vallejo that Meta backed with $15 million to scale up affordable housing construction. But in June 2024, the factory was sold to a private equity firm after months of financial trouble, casting doubt on the effectiveness of the investment.

Even one of the few remaining projects tied to the original initiative—Meta’s promise to develop housing on land it owns in Menlo Park—remains stalled. The Willow Village site was envisioned as a mixed-use campus with over 1,700 homes, but only around 300 units were to be affordable.

Though the project was approved by the Menlo Park City Council in 2022, there is still no clear timeline for when construction might begin.

Meta was supposed to fund new roads, a power station, and even a fire station for the area, but the company has remained silent about when any of it might materialize.

Some projects did get off the ground, like the $25 million donation to build 110 units of teacher housing in Palo Alto, which are expected to open later this year. But those are the exceptions, not the rule, in a larger initiative that appears to have been gutted from the inside.

The story of Meta’s housing initiative is also the story of Silicon Valley’s changing priorities. In 2019, companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft seemed to be locked in a competition over who could be the most philanthropic.

Each announced massive housing pledges within months of each other, creating what one housing advocate jokingly called the “atonement arms race.”

But corporate generosity proved to be fragile. Within Meta, the housing program encountered stiff resistance from the finance department, which refused to greenlight projects that lacked clear financial returns within a few fiscal quarters.

The program also lost its internal champions. Elliot Schrage, one of its architects and a close advisor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, stepped away from leadership in 2018, and his successor lacked the same influence to protect the initiative. CFO Dave Wehner, another supporter, stepped down in 2022, leaving the housing team exposed.

By the time Meta was slashing 11,000 jobs in 2022 to offset massive losses from its metaverse investment, the housing initiative was already on the chopping block.

In the cold logic of quarterly earnings, the idea of building affordable apartments for teachers simply didn’t compete with the promise of digital worlds and augmented reality.

Still, some of those who worked on the project recall the brief period of impact with pride. Lindsay Haddix, one of the program’s first hires, said her team was finally gaining momentum when the layoffs hit. She now leads a housing nonprofit and is worried about the funding void Meta’s exit has left behind.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg’s separate philanthropic arm, has also stepped back from housing, exacerbating the problem. With public funding drying up and federal programs stretched thin, local nonprofits are finding fewer and fewer willing corporate partners.

Meta’s retreat comes at a time when California’s housing crisis is worse than ever. Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2018 promise to build 3.5 million homes by 2025 is far from being fulfilled, and the state continues to see some of the highest rents and housing costs in the nation.

The original pledge had come in part as a response to increasing hostility toward tech companies, especially in the Bay Area. Anti-tech protests were becoming common, and residents blamed companies like Meta for turning once-affordable neighborhoods into enclaves for the wealthy.

Buses transporting tech workers were routinely vandalized. Entire communities were displaced. Candlelight vigils mourned neighborhoods erased by gentrification and speculative development.

Meta had positioned itself as part of the solution. But now, housing advocates say it is part of the problem once again, and perhaps always was. The difference is that now, the company no longer seems interested in pretending otherwise.

Some insiders suggest Meta could revive the initiative under political pressure. With a new presidential administration focused on corporate accountability, and growing bipartisan support for tech regulation, it’s not unthinkable that housing pledges could once again become politically expedient.

But others are less hopeful. They see the current version of Meta as a company that no longer believes in collective progress, only in quarterly profits and algorithmic dominance.

The $1 billion housing initiative, once a symbol of Silicon Valley’s potential to give back, is now a cautionary tale. It reveals how easily even the grandest of promises can vanish when the spotlight fades and the spreadsheets take over.

Zuckerberg once said that housing was the defining challenge of our generation. But today, it’s clear that for Meta, it’s a challenge they’d rather leave for someone else to solve.