Across the street from an aging laundromat and a tiny Chinese restaurant, a sprawling new apartment complex looks, at first glance, like a sign of gentrification near San Jose’s Japantown neighborhood. But it’s actually supportive housing for chronically unhoused seniors in the area. And it was built with help from an unlikely source: Apple.

Nearly four years ago, the tech giant committed to spend $2.5 billion to help fight the housing crisis in California, with CEO Tim Cook saying that the company felt a “profound civic responsibility” to address the challenge. (It’s also in the company’s self-interest since even tech workers can struggle to afford a home.) So far, the company has spent almost $1.5 billion of the fund, supporting the creation of thousands of new homes.

“We really look for projects and programs where not only do we have a deep impact, but we actually see the impact fairly quickly,” says Kristina Raspe, Apple’s vice president of worldwide real estate and facilities. “That’s why we’ve chosen to focus on funding projects that need that last tranche of funding in order to be built, as opposed to projects that are still in the conceptual phase.”

With the nonprofit Housing Trust Silicon Valley, Apple has helped support projects that had already gone through the approvals process but hit last-minute snags in funding. “We were trying to basically ‘unstick’ projects,” says Fathia Macauley, chief lending officer at Housing Trust Silicon Valley. Affordable-housing developments rely on several layers of funding from different sources to get built; a project might initially have funding in place, but if the approval process is delayed and construction costs rise, for example, it can end up with a financial gap. “Timing is an issue,” Macauley says. “Sometimes they have to wait another year, and the project doesn’t get done.”

The program helped fund the new 94-unit supportive housing complex, Villas at 4th Street, in San Jose, where seniors are now beginning to move in. Another 82-unit building in San Jose and a 30-unit building in the city of Pittsburgh, around an hour away, are also complete. Four other developments are nearing completion, and six are under construction.

Destination Home, another Silicon Valley nonprofit, has used funding from Apple to build several thousand new units of supportive and extremely low-income housing in the Bay Area. The nonprofit also helped support the Villas at 4th Street project, in part by partnering with the City of San Jose to fund a new city planner who was assigned to work on deeply affordable housing projects, beginning with the Villas development. “We’re creating space within the system to get a better process and speed up the approvals of projects like this,” says Ray Bramson, chief operating officer at Destination Home.

The nonprofit has also used Apple money in a homelessness prevention program. “It looks at people who are currently housed that are at greatest risk of losing their homes, and provides them with one-time or time-limited assistance to make sure they stay stable,” Bramson says. The program has provided direct financial assistance to 24,000 people so far.

Apple is also working with the California Housing Finance Agency, CalHFA, to help give mortgage and down-payment assistance to low-income and moderate-income first-time homebuyers in the Bay Area. The company also partnered with CalHFA to support a bond-recycling program that’s helping to build thousands of new units and rehab other buildings for new tenants. (The mechanism of bond recycling is complex, but Apple’s financial support basically makes it possible for the state to access funds that it otherwise couldn’t.)

From the beginning, as Apple met with organizations working on housing in order to research the challenge, it realized that it wanted to take a broad approach. “We definitely came into the work with eyes wide open about how complex these challenges were,” says Raspe. “And we understood that there was going to be no single solution that solved it. So we tried to create a program that could reach across all the areas of needs, understanding that a person who has been chronically unhoused, maybe a senior, is going to have very different needs than, say, a teacher who needs help purchasing their first home in the district where they work.”

Of course, the work is only one piece of what’s needed, and the problem is large. In San Jose, for example, the median rent is now higher than anywhere else in the country, at $3,411 a month as of June. The city had a goal to build 25,000 new housing units, including 10,000 that are affordable, by this year; though more than 15,000 market-rate units were built or are in progress, it missed the goal for affordable housing. More than 6,300 people in the city are homeless.

There are multiple challenges in addition to funding gaps, including community opposition to affordable-housing projects. “We also need state and local governments to make it easier to get projects approved,” says Michael Lane, the state policy director at the nonprofit SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Research Association. The state has passed laws over the last few years to make it easier to build new housing, but more policies are needed.

Still, Lane says, companies can play an important role. Apple’s commitment is “impressive and thoughtful and strategic,” he says. “They haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel, but they’ve actually engaged with the finance ecosystem that we have and have found ways to bring additional value to that.” Apple is also swapping land with Santa Clara County, which the county will use to build housing for teachers. (The county will give Apple a smaller parcel elsewhere in exchange.) Lane says that sharing land is another important way that companies can help begin to tackle the housing crisis.

Other massive tech companies, including Google and Meta, also have large efforts underway to help build more affordable housing. But they also exacerbated the housing crisis through growth and high salaries: Demand for housing outstrips supply, and tech workers can afford to overpay for rent. Arguably, allowing remote work can help (though it can also export California’s housing problem to other states). But because of the scope of the problem, remote work “won’t be the solution,” Lane says. “Unfortunately, we were in such a deficit in terms of housing that to get out of that, it’s going to take additional production of housing.”

Right now, the state is still losing workers because they can’t afford to live there. “That’s an existential threat to our economy going forward as a state,” he says. “So that’s why I think it’s in the enlightened self-interest for corporations to step in and also try to help with the issue.”

Apple is continuing to look for ways to spend its next $1 billion. “We don’t have a specific timeline for the last billion dollars of funding,” says Raspe. “We’re really just focused on finding the right projects where we can have the most significant impact, and moving forward with them as quickly as we can.”

This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Kristina Raspe’s name.