Citing a profound civic responsibility in the tech-heavy city of San Jose, CEO of Apple Inc. Tim Cook created a corporate fund to advance affordable housing projects in the city four years ago.

Now, $1.5 billion has already been spent, and it's resulted in the creation of thousands of housing units across the city and county, and more.

As one might expect from the world's largest company by market cap and revenue, the funding has been targeted, strategic, and effective, thanks to a plan to plug critical gaps in existing housing projects or innovate when necessary.

"We really look for projects and programs where not only do we have a deep impact, but we actually see the impact fairly quickly," Kristina Raspe, Apple's vice president of worldwide real estate and facilities, told Fast Company.

"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."

Raspe and Apple have achieved that by relying on affordable housing non-profit partners like Housing Trust Silicon Valley, which provides Apple with lists of apartment and housing units that already went through planning and approval, but which hit last-minute snags.

For example, Apple's housing fund was able to get a 94-unit apartment building called the Villas at 4th Street in San Jose's Japantown unstuck and open for chronically-unhoused senior citizens. Housing Trust Silicon Valley has also managed to secure the completion of another 82-unit building in San Jose on 333 Page Street, and a 30-unit building in the nearby city of Pittsburgh.

In the Bay Area, Destination: Home, another of Apple's partners, have been able to secure some of the fund's money to build thousands of "extremely-affordable" homes in the county, as well as provide limited financial support to 24,000 people at the highest risk of losing their homes.

Apple has also traded 5 acres of land in Cupertino, where the company is headquartered, with the county to facilitate the construction of affordable housing for teachers near the schools where they work. The county will give Apple a smaller parcel of land elsewhere.

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