Google pledges $1 billion to ease the Silicon Valley housing crisis it helped create

In 2014, The Verge reported how Google had effectively created its own island in Silicon Valley, something akin to a company town, exacerbating a housing and traffic crisis that now characterizes much of the San Francisco Bay Area — the place with the highest housing costs in the nation.
Now, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is announcing the company’s biggest commitment by far to fix its broken backyard: a $1 billion investment over the next 10 years to build some 20,000 units of housing.