Housing and other real-estate development projects require much more money than moves around the startup ecosystem and such projects don't offer the sort of returns that those investors typically seek. Throw a billion dollars at an active urban real-estate market and maybe it moves a little and maybe it provides a low teens internal rate of return. There aren't unicorns in real-estate. It's a place where pension funds and insurance companies park assets for the term of fifteen and thirty year mortgages by backing project types with track records, e.g. Class A office space.<p>To put it another way, adding a 1000 rental units in a place like San Francisco at an affordable $200,000 each (as if it were possible) requires two hundred million dollars in funding and would take four or five years for acquisition, entitlement, construction and occupancy under the best of circumstances. Rent them out at $3000 per month and the income is $36,000,000 a year. After ten years or so, assuming that the market doesn't go south, there's the potential for a pretty good return...but those just ain't startup numbers and venture capital timelines.<p>And that's just a few units in one local market. At scale the amount of capital required is vast.