YOU KNOW WHAT’S PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS: Apple wants affordable housing in California—but laws stand in the way.

Apple has pledged $2.5 billion to help address California’s affordable-housing crisis, the company announced on Monday. In recent years, the San Francisco Bay Area has become the most expensive housing market in America. Los Angeles also suffers from housing costs far above the national average.

Apple’s $2.5 billion package includes several different initiatives. Apple will offer a $1 billion line of credit to organizations building housing for low-income people.

These efforts to promote affordable housing are laudable, but corporate initiatives alone are unlikely to solve California’s housing crisis. The Golden State’s fundamental housing problem is that state and local laws simply don’t allow developers to build enough housing to accommodate rising demand.

Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have all announced billion-dollar-or-more housing plans, but they’d get better results spending a fraction of that amount helping to elect local Republicans on a deregulation platform.

But it seems that Big Tech, just like Big Government, would rather throw around large sums of money to little effect.