(The Center Square) – Almost half of Bay Area residents are considering leaving in the few years due to housing, homelessness and cost of living issues, according to a new annual poll from Joint Venture Silicon Valley. However, that’s still a major improvement from their earlier polls, which found well more than half of residents planned on leaving.
Given the recent significant decline in the Bay Area’s population, it could be that many of those individuals left, but the poll suggests real optimism may be behind some of the improvement in sentiment.
Silicon Valley Joint Venture — a local think tank — conducted a 2021 poll that found that 56% of respondents were planning on leaving the Bay Area in “the next few years,” with the cost of housing, cost of living, and homelessness as the top three concerns. Only 48% said the region was heading in the right direction and 71% said quality of life was worse than it was five years ago.
Three years later in their 2024 poll, 47% of respondents are planning on leaving soon, though the same three concerns still dominate residents’ minds. However, fewer respondents were happy with the region’s direction, with 38% saying things are going in the right direction, and 70% — a change from 2021 within the margin of error — say quality of life is worse than it was five years ago. Despite the negative attitude about the general situation, 83% of respondents were optimistic about their own lives.
According to the California government, the nine-county Bay Area’s population declined by roughly 45,000 between 2020 and 2021, while San Francisco lost approximately 65,000 residents, or 7.2% of its population, suggesting those remaining 20,000 residents left San Francisco but remained in the Bay Area.
“High housing costs are the most-cited reason for intent to leave, with two in three listing housing costs as their top reason. The next most selected reason is quality of life issues (49%), followed by taxes (37%), the political environment (28%), the amount of homelessness (28%), and traffic congestion (22%),” the report noted.
The poll highlighted major perceptual splits along political and racial lines. While only 18% of Democrats thought quality of life had seriously declined in the last five years, 68% of Republicans feel that way. Meanwhile, Hispanic (42%) and black residents (40%) were almost 50% more likely than Asian (30%) or white (27%) residents to report feelings of serious decline in quality of life.
This racial split most closely followed concerns about homelessness and crime; 89% of black respondents said homelessness is a serious problem, followed by Hispanics at 85%, then white and Asian respondents at 76%. Sixty-six percent of black respondents said crime is a serious problem, with Hispanics at 56%, Asians at 50%, and whites at 42%.
However, these concerns did not translate for residents overall into what policies they want for the area; the top concern was constructing affordable housing at 39%, following restrictions on investors purchasing homes at 32%, with more funding for law enforcement tied with reducing residential tax burdens at 29%.
While San Francisco has focused significantly on reducing the number of homeless encampments on the streets by enforcing anti-camping laws — tents are down 60% from their July 2023 peak — evidence suggests those homeless haven’t gone into shelter or left but are simply living without tents to avoid arrest.
