More Than One-Third of Bay Area Residents Want to Leave: Poll

More than one-third of Bay Area residents want to get out of the beautiful but pricey region in the next few years, citing high housing costs and traffic as their biggest reasons, according to a poll released Monday.

Of the 1,000 people polled by the Bay Area Council, 34 percent said they are considering leaving. Those who have lived here five years or less are the most likely to want to leave. In terms of transportation, 34 percent of those surveyed said it was "somewhat harder to get around than a year ago." And 20 percent said it was "much harder" to get around than a year ago.

In terms of housing, 74 percent of those surveyed said it was harder to find housing than a year ago.

And it certainly isn't cheap to leave here. The Economic Policy Institute statistics shows that it costs a family of four about $84,000 to live in San Francisco a year, about $79,000 a year to live in San Jose and Sunnyvale, and about $75,000 a year to live in Oakland and Fremont.

The poll was first reported by the Bay Area News Group.

"This is our canary in a coal mine," said Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council told the newspaper. "Residents are screaming for solutions."

In addition, this year's poll found that 40 percent of respondents felt the Bay Area was on the wrong track, the newspaper reported. Just 37 percent of Santa Clara County residents believe the Bay Area is headed in the right direction, and only 33 percent of San Francisco residents think the region is on the right track. And, 52 percent of San Francisco residents say the Bay Area is on the wrong track, the poll showed.

"This survey underscores that we have a choice," Carl Guardino, president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, told the newspaper. "We can be enraged, or we can be engaged. We can engage the broader community on solutions that actually tackle these seemingly insurmountable problems."

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