MacKenzie Scott’s annual season of giving is upon us, with the announcement of massive new gifts this week to an array of historically black colleges and universities. Meanwhile, an area of her giving that’s received less attention has emerged as one of the hot-button topics of the political year: affordable housing.
Everybody knows that the cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area in particular is off the hook.
Enter Scott’s Yield Giving, which stepped up last year to help address the housing crisis for low- to moderate-income earners stemming from the influx of global tech giants to the region. Scott’s donations to housing nonprofits in the area include a $30 million gift to Housing Trust Silicon Valley in the fall of 2024, funding that is slated to both expand affordable rental housing and grow homeownership in the region.
“This gift allows us to take bold steps at a critical moment,” said Noni Ramos, the organization’s CEO, in September as part of an announcement unveiling a 10-year plan to use the Yield Giving funds. “It shows real trust in our ability to deliver, and with that comes the responsibility and freedom to accelerate and scale what’s working, take calculated risks on new ideas and grow our reach so more of our neighbors can find the stability of a home.”
Housing Trust Silicon Valley is a Bay Area community development financial institution (CDFI) that works to find affordable housing solutions through creative finance and public-private partnerships. CDFIs include banks, credit unions, loan funds, microloan funds or venture capital providers that help modest earners finance their first homes. Since its founding in 2000, the trust says it has helped create more than 28,700 housing opportunities, supporting more than 53,800 residents. “When funders, developers and communities work together, the results are far greater than the sum of their parts,” Julie Quinn, Housing Trust Silicon Valley chief development and impact officer, told IP. “When public, private and philanthropic partners come together, we can take on challenges no single sector can solve alone.”
The organization’s 10-year plan includes expanding its core revolving loan fund and piloting new tools for developers. “Our focus is on problem-solving, not just product design,” said Quinn. “We’re listening to what developers need most and creating financing that helps projects overcome barriers — whether that’s timing, pricing or terms.” And next year, the trust intends to extend its first-time homebuyer programs across a wider geographic area. It also plans to add staff to strengthen its advocacy and collaborations in an effort to unlock more resources and affordable housing opportunities. And in the new year, it also expects to launch a framework to better track, evaluate and communicate its results for the region — all with an eye toward reducing housing costs, shortening development timelines and increasing affordability.
It’s not just about the one-time lump sum, either. “By putting these funds to work strategically, we can attract new partners, expand homeownership opportunities and make loans to create and preserve affordable rental housing in ways we were not able to before,” said Housing Trust Board Chair Lisa Gutierrez, senior VP and director of business development with U.S. Bank, in a press statement.
The gift also strengthens the Housing Trust, added Gutierrez, so it can continue to grow its impact. “It’s about turning generosity into durable solutions for Bay Area families.”
Affordable housing is a significant issue for Scott
Scott’s well-documented philanthropic approach is characterized by trust-based, no-strings-attached awards that give nonprofits flexibility to achieve their goals. In the affordable housing space, that can translate into directing funding to accelerate lending, expand homeownership, fuel policy and innovation and strengthen organizations and their impact. Scott understands that housing is a basic need, key to advancing outcomes related to economic mobility, health and education. Put simply: People need a stable place to live in order to thrive, learn and prosper.
“Trust-based giving removes conventional constraints and positions recipients to maximize creativity and innovation,” said Quinn. “It allows organizations like Housing Trust to direct resources where they’re most needed… That kind of flexibility is rare in philanthropy and it’s what enables us to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”
Scott, who was married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos from 1993 until their 2019 divorce, has a history of supporting affordable housing programs. During Scott’s marriage to the multibillionaire (he was named by Forbes the third-richest man in the world in 2025 with a net worth of more than $250 billion; Scott comes in at No. 68 on the list with a mere $28.2 billion), they started the Day One Fund in 2018 to address homelessness and establish preschools in underserved communities. Now known as the Bezos Day One Fund, the $2 billion fund granted $110.5 million in 2024 to 40 organizations around the country helping housing-insecure families find safe, stable housing and support services.
Since Scott has given to so many causes worthy of significant philanthropic funding, it’s easy to overlook some of the issue areas her gift-giving touches — even ones where she leads the way. Case in point: Scott has donated to dozens of organizations working in the shelter space, particularly those focused on affordable housing. For example, in 2023, Scott’s housing-related giving included $25 million to Denver-based affordable housing nonprofit Mercy Housing, $20 million to the nonprofit San Francisco Community Land Trust and $15 million each to the nonprofit National Low Income Housing Coalition, the national CDFI Community Preservation Corporation and the Southern California-based CDFI Century Housing.
But her biggest single gifts to date in this category came in 2024. Scott gave $40 million to New York’s Corporation for Supportive Housing, a national nonprofit intermediary and CDFI. And last November, Enterprise Community Partners announced a whopping $65 million grant from Yield Giving. Enterprise Community Partners helps to develop, invest in and support affordable housing with a focus on racial equity and upward economic mobility. That plays out in different ways, such as by providing capital for affordable housing and community development projects and offering flexible loans and technical assistance to organizations across the country. Since 1982, the organization has invested more than $72 billion and created 1 million homes around the U.S.
The Enterprise Community Partners windfall, which came four years after Scott first gave the organization $50 million, “was a complete surprise,” an Enterprise spokesperson told IP’s Mike Scutari late last year. Scott’s original gift required the nonprofit to share an annual report for three years with information on how it leveraged the funding and the impact it had. The latest gift required no such documentation. (Another hallmark of Scott’s giving is how rarely she requires recipients to fill out financial or narrative reports. Enterprise’s experience suggests this isn’t an iron-clad rule, noted Scutari, and perhaps her team set markers around the 2020 gift with an eye toward potentially providing follow-up support. In any event, for Enterprise, it paid off handsomely.)
Scott also made another $65 million gift to community development organization Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Started with seed funding and technical assistance from the Ford Foundation, LISC is now one of the country’s largest community development organizations and acts as an intermediary between community groups and private and governmental funders to provide financing for housing. Since its founding in 1979, LISC has invested $32 billion to create more than 506,000 affordable homes and apartments.
Scott’s largesse since 2019 may make her the largest individual donor to affordable housing in the United States right now. Scott gave more than $436 million to Habitat for Humanity organizations in 2022 alone. “Communities across the country are experiencing the deep ripple effects the housing crisis has on our economy and the strain housing prices are putting on people already struggling to afford basic necessities,” an Enterprise spokesperson told IP last November. “It’s promising to see leading philanthropists like Scott also recognize this urgent need and commit to financing community-based and supply-focused solutions so this work can continue and accelerate.”
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The importance of philanthropy in the housing arena
In recent decades, as precariously housed populations have grown in cities and suburban and rural areas alike, the role of housing philanthropy has taken on new urgency. As IP noted in its 2024 State of American Philanthropy Giving for Housing and Homelessness report, today’s deepening housing crisis can in good part be traced to the Great Recession of 2008. COVID-19 exacerbated the problem, and it’s only grown worse since. Around 21 million renter households spent more than 30% of their income on housing costs in 2023, representing nearly half of the 42.5 million renter households in the U.S. for whom rent burden is calculated, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Low-income, Black and Latino renters are more likely than other tenants to be cost burdened, housing advocates note. Meanwhile, for both home renters and owners, a record 42.9 million households were cost burdened and some 21.5 million households in 2023 were severely cost burdened — defined as households devoting more than 50% of their income to housing — marking an all-time high, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Of course, critical to the housing affordability question is gentrification, which can push lower-income households into lower-cost neighborhoods with fewer resources. The redevelopment sparked by the tech industry’s presence in places such as the Bay Area, Seattle and Austin has played no small part in the high cost of housing in these areas.
Which brings us back to Housing Trust Silicon Valley. The organization has invested more than $690 million and leveraged nearly $9 billion in additional public and private capital to address housing needs. It could, of course, always do more — with help, said Quinn.
“Housing Trust is one of only a handful of nonprofits offering investment opportunities through a Community Impact Note program, an easy, standardized way for individuals, foundations and corporations to invest in affordable housing solutions,” Quinn said. “It’s a simple but powerful way to make capital active for good.” Community impact notes are a kind of win-win for investors: They allow individuals and institutions to provide capital for social and environmental projects while earning a financial return. Typically, they’re offered by mission-driven, nonprofit CDFIs like Enterprise Community Partners.
“There’s enormous opportunity for philanthropy to expand its reach by adding impact investing to the mix,” said Quinn.
