(The Town Square) – A new yearly poll from Joint Venture Silicon Valley finds that housing, homelessness, and the high cost of living are making almost half of Bay Area residents think about leaving in the next few years.
More than half of the people who lived there before the polls said they were planning to leave, so that’s still a big change. Since the number of people living in the Bay Area has been going down recently, it’s possible that many of those people have left.
However, the poll shows that some of the improvement in mood may be due to real optimism. A local think tank called Silicon Valley Joint Venture did a study in 2021 and found that 56% of people were planning to leave the Bay Area in “the next few years.”
The top three reasons given were the cost of housing, the cost of living, and homelessness. Only 48% thought the region was going in the right way, and 71% thought life was worse now than it was five years ago.
In their 2024 poll, three years later, 47% of people said they were going to leave soon, but the same three worries are still at the top of people’s minds. Fewer people were happy with the direction of the region, though.
Only 38% said things were going in the right way, and 70% said quality of life is worse now than it was five years ago, which is a change from 2021 that was within the margin of error. Even though most of the people who answered were negative about the world, 83% were positive about their own lives.
The California government says that between 2020 and 2021, the population of the nine-county Bay Area dropped by about 45,000 people. At the same time, San Francisco lost about 65,000 people, or 7.2% of its population. This means that those 20,000 people left San Francisco but stayed in the Bay Area.
“Range of housing costs is the main reason people say they want to leave, with two out of three citing it as the main reason.” Quality of life issues came in second with 49% of the votes, then taxes (37%), the political climate (28%), the number of homeless people (28%), and traffic congestion (22%),” the report said.
The poll showed big differences in how people think about things based on race and politics. Of Democrats who thought quality of life had seriously dropped in the last five years, only 18% said they did. But 68% of Republicans said they did.
Hispanic (42% of residents) and black (40%) residents were almost 50% more likely than Asian (30%) or white (27% of residents) residents to say they felt their quality of life was getting worse.
This racial split came right after worries about homelessness and crime. 89% of black respondents said homelessness is a major problem, followed by 85% of Hispanic respondents and 76% of white and Asian respondents.
66% of black people who answered said crime is a big problem. 56% of Hispanic people, 50% of Asian people, and 42% of white people said the same thing.
However, these worries didn’t affect what policies people want for the area as a whole. The biggest concern was building affordable housing, which came in at 39%.
Next was putting limits on investors buying homes, which came in at 32%. Finally, getting more money for law enforcement and lowering property taxes tied for second place at 29%.
San Francisco has done a lot to reduce the number of homeless camps on the streets by strictly enforcing anti-camping laws. The number of tents is down 60% from its peak in July 2023, but there is evidence that some homeless people haven’t gone to shelter or left; they are just living without tents to avoid being caught.