SEATTLE TIMES (JANUARY 18, 2019) – HThe pledge is the largest in the company’s 44-year history, and comes as Microsoft and other tech giants that have driven the region’s economic boom face increasing pressure to help mitigate affordable-housing shortages.
Blessed with a balance sheet that allows for sweeping gestures, Redmond tech giant Microsoft is responding to the region’s widening affordability gap with a $500 million pledge to address homelessness and develop affordable housing across the Puget Sound region.
Most of the money will be aimed at increasing housing options for low- and middle-income workers — workers who “teach our kids in schools, and put out the fires in our houses and keep us alive in the hospital,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith — at a time when they’re being priced out of Seattle and parts of the Eastside, and when the vast majority of new buildings target wealthier renters.
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