The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has a $500 million plan to ease the Bay Area housing crisis

The housing affordability crisis in the Bay Area has been growing worse, with no end in sight, for over a decade. This year, though, may be the one in which some of the most powerful players in the region step up to do something about it. On January 15, the Oakland-based healthcare nonprofit Kaiser Permanente committed more than $50 million to preserve affordable housing in the city.

And nine days after that, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the Ford Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) introduced a large fund dedicated to developing and preserving affordable housing. The Partnership for the Bay’s Future aims to stabilize housing for 175,000 families in the next five years through a combination of affordability-preserving measures: They aim to fund nonprofits looking to buy up buildings in the region to keep them affordable, and help localities develop rent-control and tenant protection measures. That work is already beginning: One of the Partnership’s first steps will be extending a line of credit to the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation, a nonprofit that will use the funds to buy up around six properties and preserve them as affordable housing. After that, the partnership wants to help develop or preserve at least 8,000 new affordable homes in the region. In total, the Partnership will invest over $500 million in the affordable housing effort.