Northern California's gravity-defying tech boom continues to soar. And it's not getting any easier to keep a roof over your head. As Curbed reported on June 14th:

If Google wants to build its mammoth new campus in downtown San Jose, the tech giant needs to commit to building more than 17,700 new homes in the area, including more than 5,200 units priced at below market rates to keep rents at current levels. At least, that’s the argument by labor group Working Partnerships USA.

Not a week later, Google made a big announcement. As reported by NPR:

Google is committing $1 billion to try to provide more affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area.... Google says the money should result in 20,000 new homes added to the local market, over 10 years. [T]he company will "repurpose at least $750 million of Google's land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing." That move should result in 15,000 new homes at all income levels, including for low- and middle-income prospective homebuyers, the Google CEO said. In the second part of the plan, Google will create a $250 million investment fund that will be used to give developers incentives to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units.

Multihousing Pro magazine reports that Google is leasing, not donating, the land. Describing this as a $1 billion "commitment" feels a bit fishy in that case—though the prospect remains that it could lease it to developers at well under market rate, I suppose.

Regardless, this might actually do some serious good. But it also won't ever scale. That fact makes it an object lesson in why this problem is so impossible to solve without a dramatic overhaul of how cities regulate land use and development.

What Corporate Clout Can Fix

This is not a small amount of housing. Multihousing Pro puts the size of this effort into context:

Google points out that there were only 3,000 homes built in the South Bay in 2018. Assuming that the 20,000 new homes targeted by the plan in the next 10 years are built, this would increase the current rate of new home construction by 2/3, a very significant increase.

Aside from already owning a large amount of land in the area, Google is able to make such a dent for a key reason: it almost certainly has the clout to push rezoning and development approvals through the political process, in a way a more conventional developer can't, and a small-scale developer certainly can't. It has already started working with the cities of Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and San Jose on exactly this.