Facebook’s Catalyst Housing Fund gets $1 million investment from San Francisco Foundation

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP Corporate Communications & Public Policy, announced today that The San Francisco Foundation is contributing $1 million to the Catalyst Housing Fund.

“Though the [Silicon Valley] region is thriving in many ways, our community clearly needs more affordable places to live,” he said in a press release. “That’s why we’re working alongside our neighbors to increase affordable housing in the Bay Area.”

In 2016, Facebook announced a partnership with Envision Transform Build and the cities of East Palo Alto and Menlo Park to create regional solutions to the affordable housing crisis. A pillar of the partnership was to create the Catalyst Housing Fund with an initial investment of $18.5 million to pursue innovative and scalable ways to increase the construction and protection of affordable housing.

Then, in August 2017, Facebook announced that Local Initiatives Support Corporation and Housing Trust Silicon Valley would manage the fund and leverage the initial investment to as much as $75 million.

The Menlo Park-based social media company plans to deploy funds in the next five to eight years to accelerate the development of affordable housing in the region.