Poll finds more than half of Bay Area residents plan to leave for good.

Why? 'It's housing, stupid'

 

Featured in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Another day, another poll about how expensive it is to live in the Bay Area.

Only this time, San Jose think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley found a majority of residents actually planning to leave the region in “the next few years” — around 56% of more than 1,600 people surveyed in five counties. That compares to a broader pre-pandemic poll of all nine Bay Area counties by business group the Bay Area Council, which in 2018 found that 46% of residents considered moving away.

While there’s no shortage of factors contributing to today’s uncertainty — remote work, peak wildfire season, a lingering global pandemic — the report authors zeroed in on one key motivation.

“It’s housing, stupid,” said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley. “That is driving almost all of the results we see in this poll.”

The new survey, which was conducted online in late September by polling firm Embold Research, highlights a growing tension between the Bay Area as a beacon of job opportunities but a place that looks a lot like a financial trap for both renters and aspiring home buyers. While the concerns aren’t new, Hancock said the big question is how many people may be newly emboldened to leave as the pandemic wanes.

Among the registered voters surveyed in Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, San Francisco and Contra Costa counties, 71% said the Bay Area is still a “good” or “excellent” place to pursue a career. But only 45% said it’s an appealing place to raise a family. A mere 11% were optimistic about buying a house here.

Around 90% of respondents expressed concerns about housing, cost of living and homelessness. Across the board, just 48% of those polled said they believe the Bay Area is “moving in the right direction.”

“As a pollster, I don’t tend to see a lot of consensus,” said Alex Chen, a data analyst at the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies. “But there are some very strong signals here.”

Biggest concerns for Bay Area residents

A new poll by think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley found that 56% of residents are considering leaving. Here's why, based on how many people considered each problem "extremely" or "very" serious. 

 

Now, the fear for people like Hancock who are tracking the data is that these shifts will ultimately compound the region’s “grotesque disparities” and undermine its prosperity. The poll also asked how many tech workers in particular are considering moving, and found that a similarly high 53% are also mulling an exit in the next few years, with about 70% opposing a full-time return to in-person offices.

“Folks out there in the tech companies especially are saying, ‘That’s my deal breaker. I need flexibility,’” Hancock said.

Whether all the talk about moving actually translates to sizable population declines in the Bay Area will hinge on several hard-to-predict factors, including how many new, young transplants step in to fill any void. In recent months, rents have started rising again in cities including San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, suggesting that pandemic price declines may have been only temporary.

In the meantime, all the anxiety about housing is boiling over in local eviction battles and fueling policy reforms in Sacramento, including recently approved SB9 to allow for denser housing in all residential neighborhoods. That measure and others to increase building have also stirred up intense controversy at city halls around the Bay Area, reinforcing divides about the region’s trajectory evident in the new poll.

“Half the people are with you, half the people are not with you,” Hancock said. “We have this deliberate opportunity to take some steps forward.”

While other recent reports suggest that fears of a large-scale Bay Area exodus to other states are overblown, significant numbers of Californians are decamping for places like Texas. Even within the Golden State, a diverse cross section of middle- and working-class residents have been moving farther away from the Bay Area, to regions like the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the Central Valley.

Migration out of the Bay Area has fueled super commutes and exurban boomtowns for decades. But in this awkward phase of the pandemic, traffic is creeping back onto working-class arteries like the Altamont Pass, even as Silicon Valley tech campuses remain ghost towns.