Microsoft is investing $500 million to help develop affordable housing and address homelessness in the Seattle area as the growth of tech companies in the region continues to flood the real estate market with high-salaried workers, leaving many other people behind.

The software company made the announcement Wednesday, explaining that the windfall will be distributed over the next three years. Most of it will go toward preserving and building new homes for low- and middle-income residents. A much smaller portion will immediately go toward homeless services and programs to keep people from being evicted – as of a count conducted in January 2017, the city recorded more than 11,500 homeless residents.

“The housing situation in the Puget Sound region has reached a point where it’s appropriate to use the word ‘crisis,’ ” Microsoft President Brad Smith told NPR member station, KUOW, on Thursday.

“The lack of available housing is forcing many people — the schoolteachers, the nurses, the first responders, many others who work at companies — to endure longer and longer commutes. And we have even far worse problems for people who are homeless,” Smith added.

Research by Microsoft found that job growth has outpaced housing construction at such a rapid pace, the company said, “This gap in available housing has caused housing prices to surge 96 percent in the past eight years, making the Greater Seattle area the sixth most expensive region in the United States.”

Smith noted the long-term aim of the company, which is headquartered in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, is to ensure lower- and middle-income workers can continue to live close to where they work, instead of being priced out.

“I think when you take people who play vital roles in a community and you force them to live in another community it really saps the vitality for all of us,” Smith said.

The company will offer $225 million in low-cost loans to subsidize the preservation and construction of middle-income or “work force” housing in six cities – Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Issaquah, Sammamish and Renton – where the company has more than 50,000 employees. The resulting residences will target households making between $62,000 and $124,000 per year.

Another $250 million in market rate loans will support low-income housing throughout King County. These are intended for households earning 60 percent of the local median income – about $48,000 for a two-person household.

And $25 million in philanthropic grants have been allocated to tackle homelessness in the greater Seattle region, including a $5 million dollar grant to Home Base, a program created by the Seattle Mariners, the King County Bar Association and the United Way of King County, to provide legal aid for people facing evictions from their homes.

The pledge comes as Microsoft plans to expand its presence in the area by another 8,000 employees. The Seattle Times reported the software company is adding about 2.5 million square feet in new construction to the Redmond campus and plans to renovate another 6.7 million square feet.

According to Microsoft, it began working on the plan eight months ago, which means it preceded the Seattle City Council’s failed head-tax effort last year. The proposed tax would have required big businesses to help fund affordable housing and homeless services. But Amazon, the city’s other tech giant, was instrumental in killing that effort.

Microsoft’s endeavor to ameliorate the housing crisis dovetails with a recent pledge by the mayors of nine surrounding cities to take concrete steps to increase the supply of quality housing. Among the changes they’re looking to implement are changing zoning and land use regulations to increase density near public transit, streamlining and accelerating the permitting process for low- and middle-income housing developers, and providing tax incentives to encourage such developments.

Smith and Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in a blog post they are hopeful other companies will also work with local organizations and city and state agencies to bridge the affordable housing shortfall.

“Ultimately, a healthy business needs to be part of a healthy community,” they wrote. “And a healthy community must have housing that is within the economic reach of every part of the community, including the many dedicated people that provide the vital services on which we all rely.”

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Updated at 1:00 a.m. ET Thursday

Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard who created the first index mutual fund for individual investors in 1975, died Wednesday at the age of 89, the company said.

Bogle transformed the way people invest. He believed that investors should own a mix of bonds and stocks but shouldn’t pay investment managers to pick them.

That approach to investing became what economists regard as the bedrock, most powerful tool for how everyday Americans should save and invest for the future. And over the past four decades, Bogle has drastically changed the way millions of people all over the world save and invest their money.

To see the impact Bogle has had, you need to look no further than your own retirement account — chances are you have more money in there because of Jack Bogle.

That’s because by creating that first index fund back in the 1970s, Bogle started a revolution of super efficient low-cost investing — a revolution that took on Wall Street firms and the high fees they charge investors.

Bogle also became a champion for the little guy investor, perhaps because he knew what it was like not to have enough money. His family lost everything they had in the Great Depression, “so I grew up having to earn what I got, help out with family expenses,” Bogle told NPR several years ago. “I started working when I was 9 years old.”

Today the company Bogle founded, Vanguard, manages more than $5 trillion. Some of that could be your retirement savings. And it’s structured essentially as a nonprofit.

Vanguard and its index funds are built upon a pretty simple insight.

“We live in this mythical world where we kind of believe the American way is if you try harder, you will do better — that if you pay a professional to do something, it will pay off,” Bogle told NPR in 2015. “And these things are true — except in investing!”

Bogle realized that the stock market doesn’t really have that high a return. So the fees people pay, have an enormous impact on their investing returns. “Cost turns out to be everything,” he said. “It’s just what I’ve often called the ‘relentless rules of humble arithmetic.’ Those fees can eat up half of the money you would otherwise have down the road. “The tyranny of compounding long term costs because they eat you up,” Bogle said.

Bogle showed that hiring mutual fund managers to try to pick this stock over that stock, 80-90 percent of the time, you’re going to make more money just buying the entire stock market. And that’s what a broad-based index fund lets you do — just buy a big list, an index of stocks, of say the biggest companies in the U.S. Investing that way can be 10 to 20 times cheaper than traditional mutual funds with high fees. And Bogle showed with the index fund approach you are much more likely to make more money over time.

That’s why among the most popular investments now are low-cost funds that represent the S&P 500 index of the largest American companies. The pressure that put on the financial industry to lower costs has also brought fees down on many other types of investments as well far beyond Vanguard’s own index funds.

And all this is why Bogle is celebrated as basically the George Washington of an investing revolution.

“Jack Bogle has probably done more for the American investor than any man in the country,” is how Warren Buffet summed it up at a Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting in 2017.

Buffet invited Bogle there to honor him. “I estimate that Jack at a minimum has left in the pockets of investors, he’s put tens and tens of billions into their pockets and those numbers are going to be hundreds of billions over time.” Buffet called Bogle a “hero.”

But while Bogle was a critic of greed and excess on Wall Street, he was also big fan of capitalism. He spoke out, calling for young people, the leaders of tomorrow to be more idealistic, and follow his lead, and clean up the mess: “The soul of capitalism, if you will,” Bogle said. “It’s there to be fixed.”

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Netflix has raised its prices for U.S. viewers, as the company invests in original content amid growing competition from other streaming services.

The company’s most popular subscription plan, which allows high-definition viewing on two screens, has jumped from $10.99 to $12.99 per month. Its cheapest, non-HD plan has risen from $7.99 to $8.99, and its premium plan from $13.99 to $15.99.

It’s the largest hike since the company launched its video streaming service 12 years ago, according to The Associated Press. The increase has drawn a positive response from Wall Street, where Netflix’s stock increased 6.5 percent on Tuesday.

The increase will affect all consumers in the United States, the company tells NPR in a statement, as well as countries in Latin America and the Caribbean where Netflix bills in U.S. dollars, including Uruguay, Barbados and Belize. In the U.S. alone, Netflix has 58 million subscribers.

“We change pricing from time to time as we continue investing in great entertainment and improving the overall Netflix experience for the benefit of our members,” Netflix tells NPR.

Still the dominant player in streaming and subscription video on demand, Netflix has felt pressure from current rivals like Amazon and Hulu, as well as new competition set to enter the market, including Disney, NBC and Apple.

Part of the company’s strategy to deal with increased competition has been to put money into original content, which it has been producing since House of Cards hit the small screen in 2013. Michael Pachter, a media analyst at Wedbush Securities, told NPR last month that Netflix’s goal is “to be a major production company that makes compelling content that is available exclusively on Netflix.”

In a rare move that illustrates the company’s production ambitions, Netflix recently showed an original picture in theaters for several weeks before making it available online. The cinematic, black-and-white film Roma may even be an Oscar contender, NPR’s Jasmine Gard reports. And it’s already won several critics’ choice awards.

Netflix also won an Academy Award last year, for its documentary Icarus about doping among cyclists.

But the California-based company has accumulated extensive debt as it invests in that original content, the AP reports, to the tune of more than $8 billion dollars for 2018.

Netflix has also reached into its pockets for other content that attracts viewers, including the late 90’s and early 2000’s sitcom Friends. The company is paying $100 million to keep licensing the popular program for 2019, up from $30 million, The New York Times reported in December.

Increased subscription revenue will likely help balance the books over the next several years, the AP reports, as long as Netflix’s total user base of 165 million people continues to grow.

Anyone new to the streaming service will immediately be charged the higher prices, while the increases will roll out to existing customers over the next few months. Netflix will notify existing members by email 30 days before raising the cost of their subscription.

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As the government shutdown enters its fourth week — becoming the longest in United States history — federal workers around the country are struggling to make ends meet. But according to Jamiles Lartey, a reporter with The Guardian, the shutdown is having a disproportionate effect on black workers and their families.

African-Americans make up a higher percentage of federal workers than they do of the non-government workforce. That’s in part because, for generations, government work has provided good wages and job security to African-Americans who faced more overt discrimination in the private sector.

Ari Shapiro of NPR’s All Things Considered sat down with Lartey to talk about some of the ways this disparity is playing out right now.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ari Shapiro: Could you explain the history that led to our situation today, where African-Americans make up a higher percentage of the federal workforce than they do in the private sector?

Jamiles Lartey: The federal government obviously has its own untoward history of racial discrimination, from underwriting redlining, and federal mortgage programming, and excluding blacks from New Deal programming. But it has also been at the institutional vanguard of the nation’s slow march towards equality — more so than the private sector at large, and more than most state and local governments. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 8802, which banned race discrimination in the defense industry. And that’s largely seen as the most important move in support of the civil rights of black Americans from Reconstruction all the way until 1964, when the civil rights act was passed. The federal government, for fairly obvious reasons, just did a better job of abiding by the civil rights act than the labor market at large.

We know that black families have a fraction of the wealth of white families. According to the Census Bureau, for every $100 in white family wealth, black families have just over $5. So what does that mean when black government workers start missing a paycheck?

The profound racial wealth gap in the U.S. makes it far more difficult for the average black American to sustain a long period without a paycheck, as compared with white Americans.

We should note that that disparity in wealth is probably much less acute among federal workers. We don’t have numbers of black federal workers’ wealth versus white federal workers’ wealth. It’s probably much closer than the broader disparity. But overall, black Americans are less likely to have friends, family, networks, access to credit, you name it. Things that will help you survive a period without a paycheck, they’re less likely to have it.

Tell us about one of the workers you spoke with for this story?

I think the most interesting person who I spoke to from my story was an employee from the National Park Service named Laura. I had spoken to her last year, during that government shutdown, and she had asked to be made anonymous in that story. She didn’t want to rock the boat, she didn’t want to risk retribution. After going through this government shutdown, she was adamant. She was like, “I want my name out there.” She was frustrated, and on the verge of tears when we spoke. She was trying to collect some medication, worried about how she was going to pay for it, worried about her employees, worried about the contractors who work under her.

What sorts of things is she going through?

She described it as barely treading water. She said her mom called her and said, “There’s a bed here if you need to come.” And she’s like, “I’m fifty years old, I’m not about to go live with my mother.”

As tough as this is for government employees, they can at least expect to get backpay. Government contract workers may not. And you say that will also disproportionately affect black business owners. How so?

Actually much more so, and that’s the next thing we ought to look at. Unlike federal employees, there’s no precedent for government contractors to receive back pay when they shutdown ends, so that income is just gone. Black-owned firms comprise just 2 percent of all small businesses in the country but they make up 11.7 percent of registered federal contractors. That’s almost the proportion that black Americans make up in the population. Another way to put that would be, black employees are overrepresented by about 150 percent in federal employees, but black firms are overrepresented by 550 percent in federal government contracting. I say that with the caveat that we don’t know exactly how that trickles down to folks wages. But by and large, black-owned firms are going to be hit much harder by the shutdown.

Tell me about the gender divide here. Women make up 60 percent of the federal workforce — higher than the percentage they make up of the general population. What’s the significance of that gender divide on African-American families?

African Americans are about 10.5 percent of the civilian labor force, but 18.4% of federal employees. According to data from the office of Personnel Management, the share of federal workers who are black women is roughly twice as high in the federal government as it is in the greater civilian workforce. This won’t be new to anyone who studies race in America or is cognizant of how it works, but it’s going to disproportionately affect black women.

Do you get a sense that this prolonged, shutdown — the second shutdown in two years — is going to affect the way black workers think about government jobs more broadly?

It would have to, right? The effect of repeated shutdowns is going to be cumulative. One shutdown four or five years ago is one thing. To have another one last year and another one this year, and to see less light at the end of the tunnel in this one than in previous shutdowns — it’s affecting folk’s financial stability, it’s affecting their morale, and it’s disproportionately affecting black workers. One of the folks who I talked to is a federal worker who described growing up in Prince George’s county, which is one of the largest communities of middle class and upper-middle-class black people in America. That’s largely because of access to so-called “good jobs” in the federal government.

Growing up, he said he was told, “Get a good job in the government.” His mom worked for the government. His dad worked for the government. But if this continues to happen, and shutdowns continue to be used in political ways over fights in Congress, a whole generation of people is going to have to reevaluate whether that’s still the case.

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