Today, I’m proud to share the launch of The Home Project: Zillow Group’s pledge of $5 million in cash and in-kind contributions over the next five years to address housing insecurity issues within our communities.

Across the country, housing costs have not kept up with incomes, leaving many people just one medical bill, job loss, or rental increase away from losing their homes. Zillow’s research team recently published a report showing that if rents rise 5 percent in the Los Angeles metro, an additional 2,000 people falling into homelessness. In New York, more than 3,000 people would experience homelessness if rents increase 5 percent. In Seattle, that increase would add 258 people to the homeless population for a total of 12,498.

As a technology-driven company that helps people find homes and apartments, Zillow Group is uniquely positioned to address this problem. Through The Home Project, we will mobilize our people, platform and products to help combat housing insecurity, as well as partner with non-profit organizations whose missions align with The Home Project goals.

Developing products and features that can help address this issue is an opportunity that is both unique to Zillow Group, and has the potential to be really powerful and scalable. And it’s an area that many of us at Zillow Group are extremely passionate about and have already started working on addressing through product development.

For example, our first foray into developing products that addressed the needs of underserved communities was our Community Pillar Program. This program was built through a series of Zillow Hack Weeks with the goal of helping renters who are experiencing barriers to safe and reliable housing connect with landlords and property managers who want to help their communities. We have facilitated the #SeaTech4Change technical volunteer fair and the Hack Housing hackathon, both aimed at leveraging the skills of the greater Seattle tech community to build out innovative solutions and support nonprofits in the housing space. And our Hotpads team in San Francisco recently built out a listing portal to help those displaced by the NorCal fires.

And to encourage the continued development of products that help people find secure housing, in 2017 Zillow Group introduced an employee cash prize for those who create such products as part of Hack Weeks and Innovation Weeks.

These are just a few examples of the power we see in leveraging our technology platforms and our technical skills to make a unique and significant impact on housing instability. With the roll-out of the Home Project, and the support of our employees and leadership team, we are so motivated and inspired by all that we can do in this space.