The increase in the cost of living, rising homeless crunch, along with an income gap and different sustainability difficulties are hitting the greater Bay Area and Silicon Valley all at once for quite some time.
These challenges are even more emphasized with the health crisis and the latest poll divulges the fate expected by the residents for the region.
“It has people on edge, people that live feel like they’ll never be able to get ahead, they’ll never be able to have ownership, their children won’t be able to have ownership,” Joint Venture Silicon Valley CEO Russel Hancock said. “And the pandemic has nothing to address that.”
The Joint Venture Silicon Valley has recently released a poll showing that the majority of the respondents believe the deteriorating quality of life in the past years. The poll respondents are from the counties of San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara.
In the last five years, over 70 percent of the respondents believe that the quality of life in the Bay Area worsened. With the high cost of living and growing housing costs as leading reasons, 56 percent of the poll respondents said they have plans to transfer out of the region in the next number of years.
“In the Bay Area we haven’t built much housing, we have jobs mismatched, we have hundreds of thousands of jobs being generated but we’re only generating a few hundred houses,”
“And for that reason, we have the highest housing prices in the world.”
Moreover, the respondents have a different feel of where the region is headed: with 54 percent saying it’s going the wrong way while 48 percent believing it’s going the right one.
Climate change is considered an “extremely” serious problem by 55 percent of women respondents, higher than their male counterparts with only 42 percent.
Forty-four percent of women also said they feel less secure financially as compared to men, as they worry about low savings since the health crisis.
Financial security was also claimed by 40 percent of overall respondents. Big percentages were found among African American and Latino respondents.
“We’ve always known that there was an income divide but the pandemic made it stark and dramatic,” Hancock said, as reported by KRON4.
“And the people that weren’t able to easily shift into home-work faced economic ruin, and devastating health challenges because they had higher exposure to the disease.”
