Microsoft announces commitment to help affordable housing in the Puget Sound region

In 1979, Microsoft made the Puget Sound region our home when the company’s first 30 employees moved into an office building next to The Burgermaster in Bellevue. Over the decades, we’ve grown from a small start-up to become one of the world’s leading technology companies. And along the way, the entire region’s economy has diversified and expanded, bringing new jobs, people and prosperity. It’s an amazing place to call home and it’s a community that has always helped nurture Microsoft’s success.

But the Puget Sound area’s growth has also created new challenges. In recent years, our region hasn’t built enough housing for the people who live here. Since 2011, jobs in the region have grown 21 percent, while growth in housing construction has lagged at 13 percent. This gap in available housing has caused housing prices to surge 96 percent in the past eight years, making the Greater Seattle area the sixth most expensive region in the United States. 

Today, we are committing $500 million as a company to advance affordable housing solutions. We’ll put this money to work with loans and grants to accelerate the construction of more affordable housing across the region. We will invest:

• $225 million at lower than market rate returns to inject capital to subsidize the preservation and construction of middle-income housing. These investments initially will be made in six cities east of Seattle and Lake Washington: Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Issaquah, Renton and Sammamish.
• $250 million at market rate returns to support low-income housing across the entire King County region. We believe that additional capital at market lending rates can help accelerate the construction of low-income housing across the region.
• $25 million in philanthropic grants to address homelessness in the greater Seattle region. We are announcing today the first $10 million of these grants. This will include a $5 million philanthropic grant to the newly announced Home Base program created by the Seattle Mariners, the United Way of King County and the King County Bar Association. This program helps keep people facing eviction in their homes through legal aid, access to flexible funds and case management. We are also committing $5 million to support a new joint agency on homelessness being formed by the city of Seattle and King County.

Our goal is to move as quickly as possible with targeted investments that will have an outsized impact. For example, we’ve learned from efforts we’ve studied elsewhere that one effective approach is to provide short-term loans to enable those who want to build affordable housing the time needed to navigate the process of acquiring land from the public sector and raise longer-term construction financing. With these and similar investments, it’s possible to lend money, accelerate progress, be repaid and then lend this money again. While this is just one of the many ways that we’ll seek to put money to good use, it illustrates our financial commitment can have a multiplier effect.

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