LISC-Facebook Partnership Directing $150 Million to Housing for Bay Area Families with Lowest Incomes
An op-ed in the Mercury News by LISC CEO Maurice A. Jones, along with Facebook CFO Dave Wehner and Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination:Home, describes the twin urgencies created by the pandemic and longstanding housing underinvestment. The intensifying need for more affordable housing in the Bay Area has galvanized the Partnership for the Bay’s Future, funding by Facebook and managed by LISC, to ramp up investment in the COVID era.
The excerpt below was originally posted on the Mercury News:
Opinion: Coming together to house vulnerable Bay Area residents remains urgent
In this difficult year, one thing has become painfully clear: Members of our community earning the lowest incomes have suffered the most from California’s housing crisis and the pandemic.
For the decades prior to the pandemic, California has suffered from a lack of housing investment. Recent studies estimate we have fallen short by over 2 million units, and the situation in the Bay Area is particularly acute.
These twin challenges — the COVID-19 pandemic and housing underinvestment — have been particularly difficult for neighbors earning extremely low incomes (ELI) — less than 30% of the area’s median, or $47,000 for a family of four in San Jose. Those families include many of the essential workers we’ve relied on through this pandemic to stock shelves, serve food, and provide health services.
Even before COVID-19, 73% of San Jose’s residents earning extremely low incomes spent more than half of it on rent and utilities — the pandemic has pushed these families further into the margins. Today, more than 40% of these residents across the Bay Area are worried about eviction.
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- Facebook Pledges $150 Million to Build Homes for Silicon Valley’s Poorest from The Wall Street Journal
- Facebook invests $150 million to build housing for Bay Area’s poorest families from Mercury News