CUPERTINO (KRON) — Silicon Valley is known for fostering businesses and ideas that started inside someone’s garage.

But as more people begin to use their cars as their homes, big tech companies are now stepping up to help fix the Bay Area’s housing crisis. 

It’s a common theory thrown around — that the tech boom in Silicon Valley is what’s caused the Bay Area housing crisis.

But Carl Guardino with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group doesn’t agree.

“It’s been 30 years since California consistently met it’s annual target for new homes,” he said.  “We need to build to keep up with our population. It is not the fault of an employer — large or small, tech or non-tech for creating a housing crisis.”

He says it’s a collective fault — and Apple announcing it would be pledging $2.5 billion to help fix it is the right move

“This is the type of investments we need to continue to build homes that are affordable to families and individuals across the state,” Guardino said.

Here’s how it breaks down:

$1 billion will go toward building new, very, low income housing.

Another billion to first time homebuyer mortgage assistance.

$300 million of it will be a donation of Apple-owned land in San Jose

The last $200 million will go toward public private partnerships with Housing Trust Silicon Valley, and Destination: Home

But when will we see this money in action? 

Destination: Home says they’ll be allocating their funds immediately.

“We’ve been working with them for some time,” said Ray Bramson with Destination: Home.

Destination: Home has worked with several partner organizations to house nearly 8,000 residents over the last decade.  

They’ll use some of these new funds to expand their homelessness prevention program 

“We’ll be working to get more families housed, more service providers up to capacity that they need to be to meet that increased demand,” Bramson said. “Homelessness as a challenge for our community is decades in the making and no one organization is going to get us out of it.

It’s a community problem and we needed a community solution.”

Now though it’s the largest one to date, Apple isn’t the only tech company to make a commitment like this.

Facebook and Google have both recently made $1 billion pledges as well.