Tim Cook announces a 2.5 billion housing plan to increase housing availability in California to help citizens.
Even in the brick, there can be innovation, especially when the dance there is not so much a speculative real estate investment, but an intervention of social and urban value of great scope. Paradoxically, in fact, in California, the strange situation has arisen where the rising price of housing has become unsustainable for many indigenous citizens. Thousands of people are therefore moving away from their own communities (what they intimately consider “home”) because they are unable to support the increases. Apple’s commitment is valuable, then, but anything but a foregone conclusion.
Homes in the San Francisco area would now have an average price that exceeds one million dollars and this increase, stimulating an obvious natural selection among citizens, also leads to education, health and any other service. In short, Inflation is an obvious consequence of the presence of large companies, but it begins to pour on the territory serious collateral damage which someone has to take responsibility for.
That’s why Apple invests in brick
Where innovation has brought wealth, in fact, innovation itself has become a cumbersome factor that has produced a selection of income and professionalism, isolating important parts of the population in a situation of severe difficulty. The risk, however, is that some areas of workers, citizens, activists, prominent representatives of local communities and other fundamental elements for the social and urban fabric will be irretrievably depleted. Apple has chosen: “we want to be part of the solution“.
In its statement, the Cupertino Group talks about the USD 2.5 billion investment in this project, announcing that it will later reinvest the capital that will be reinvested as a result of the long-term activity that will begin as early as the next Months. At the moment, the group is exploring the landscape of companies interested in participating, putting the right requirements on the table. The capital will be needed in particular for the development of low-cost housing (1 billion) and for financial aid to first-time buyers of a home (1 billion). Apple also makes its own land (300 million) available, with the ultimate goal of developing more homes in order to increase supply and calm now excessively high prices.
Tim Cook would have cashed in on Governor Gavin Newsom’s collaboration and identified the new program as an extension of the former Long-standing Homelessness Prevention System. The problem of homelessness, therefore, becomes something that the state and the company intend to take charge of, partly by sharing social responsibilities and partly by putting their capital at stake in order to safeguard the social balance of the places where Apple too has sunk its roots. Tim Cook’s hope is that other big Silicon Valley companies will also take responsibility, sharing the plan and contributing: the San Francisco-area housing crisis could only really be solved with the collaboration of all, giving back to the local communities “dignity” (a word used by Apple and increasingly linked to the concept of “home”).
No mention of the logic of smart home, zero-impact sustainability plans or other elements that can divert the project from its main objective: regardless of what the characteristics related to urban planning, technologies and interiors will be, the houses wanted by Apple must be first of all accessible, capable of suddenly spilling onto the market to control inflationary pressures which are evidently leaving too obvious signs on the communities. A wide-ranging program, therefore, for an answer that wants to be social above all. Investing in brick is a way to invest in cornerstones on which even innovation is based: the territory, social ties, the urban fabric and all that series of balances able to satisfy the basic needs of the person. Starting from what everyone can understand as “home”.