Billionaire MacKenzie Scott gives $436m for US affordable housing
MacKenzie Scott has donated $436m to Habitat for Humanity International and 84 of its US affiliates, the largest publicly disclosed donation from the billionaire philanthropist since she promised in 2019 to give away most of her wealth.
“We could not be more excited to get the gift at a time when, in some ways, the state of housing affordability is the worst that it has been in modern times,” said Jonathan Reckford, chief executive of Habitat for Humanity International.
The group received $25m from Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, with the remaining $411m to be distributed among local affiliates.
Scott’s donation amounts to nearly 8% of the $325m in donations Habitat for Humanity International received in its 2020 fiscal year.
Reckford said Habitat for Humanity will use Scott’s donation of unrestricted funds to increase the supply of affordable housing, especially in communities of color.
Though they approach the problem in varying ways, most local affiliates will pursue projects in their communities, while the international group will focus on broader advocacy and efforts to build homes for working-class families. “Even before Covid, we already had one in seven families paying over half their income on rent or mortgage,” Reckford said.
The last two years made that problem even worse, with many people seeking to buy larger houses to ride out the pandemic. The scarcity of housing drove up prices in many markets across the US, putting homes out of reach for many first-time buyers.
“For low- and moderate-income families, who are service workers and did not have adequate shelter and still have to go out to work, this has been a catastrophe,” Reckford said.
Scott, who is worth about $48bn according to Forbes, has signed the Giving Pledge, through which many billionaires have promised to donate more than half their wealth.
Aside from an occasional blogpost, the author and philanthropist doesn’t discuss her donations, which exceeded $8bn in two years after her divorce from Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, who was then the richest person in the world. As part of the divorce settlement, Scott received 4% of Amazon’s shares.
In December, in hopes she would reduce the attention she draws, Scott declined to announce how much or to whom she donated money. She said she would prefer to let the recipients announce her gifts, as Habitat for Humanity is expected to do on Tuesday.
Last week, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America announced that it and 62 local Boys & Girls Clubs had received $281m from Scott. On Monday the Fortune Society, a New York-based group that helps the formerly incarcerated reenter society, announced that Scott donated $10m.
Scott has explained in blogs that she and Jewett donated $2.7bn in the first half of 2021 to “equity-oriented non-profit teams working in areas that have been neglected”.
Though Habitat for Humanity is best-known as a house-building nonprofit, the group, founded in 1976, says it has been working for many years toward “a world where everyone has a decent place to live”.
Natosha Reid Rice, the group’s global diversity, equity and inclusion officer, said receiving the donation from Scott this year amounted to a dream fulfilled.
Rice said Scott’s gift would accelerate the timetable on efforts to increase Black home ownership and diversify its volunteer base. It will also help the group surmount the political and financial roadblocks that make it difficult for racial minorities to buy homes.