One-third ponder leaving Bay Area amid costs, congestion

It is so difficult to keep up with the Joneses, especially while navigating through all the gridlock traffic, that a third of Bay Area residents are thinking about clearing out in the next few years.

Housing costs and a lack of availability, high prices in general and traffic topped the list of concerns in the latest of a series of surveys of residents in the nine counties surrounding San Francisco Bay. Optimism was, in fact, pretty hard to find in the poll of 1,000 residents by the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored public policy advocacy group.

“This is our canary in a coal mine,” said Jim Wunderman, president and chief executive officer of the council, which has been pushing, often against the grain of public opinion, for more high-density housing to be combined with more transit options in already developed areas.

Wunderman foresees trouble if nothing is done to ease the crunch.

“We need to act with urgency,” he said about the need for more affordable housing. “We need to act decisively, and we need to act regionally to address the underlying problems of housing and traffic that are causing discontent and aggravation.”

A mass exodus is not likely despite the fact that 34 percent of Bay Area residents said they are strongly or somewhat likely to move out. The poll found that an additional 54 percent of the respondents plan to stay put and 31 percent of those people are adamant about staying in the Bay Area.

Only 40 percent feel the region is headed in the right direction, and an equal percentage believe it is “seriously off on the wrong track,” according to the poll. Only 40 percent feel the region is headed in the right direction, and an equal percentage believe it is “seriously off on the wrong track,” according to the poll. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 28 Caption Close One-third ponder leaving Bay Area amid costs, congestion 1 / 28 Back to Gallery

Still, a good many citizens are disgruntled. Only 40 percent feel the region is headed in the right direction, and an equal percentage believe it is “seriously off on the wrong track,” according to the poll.

The most optimistic folk also happened to have the highest incomes. San Francisco residents were No. 1 in the region on the glum scale, with 52 percent saying the Bay Area is going off the rails, so to speak.

The pessimism pretty clearly tracks the recent surge in Bay Area housing prices. Last year, 55 percent felt things were heading in the right direction. In 2014, 57 percent were looking on the bright side, the poll said.

And, in case the source of people’s gloom wasn’t clear, pollsters asked folks to list their top three problems. Cost of living got the top score, with 25 percent of residents declaring it the most serious problem. Housing, with 23 percent, and traffic, with 13 percent, were next on the Bay Area’s list of big troubles. In all, 64 percent of residents in the survey identified cost of living, 48 percent named housing and 39 percent ranked traffic among their top three issues.

The trifecta of complaints in 2016 pounded last year’s biggest concern — the California drought — like a heavy El Niño rainstorm. Only 1 percent of Bay Area residents named the lack of water as the biggest problem this year, compared with 24 percent last year.

The results are in line with a previous poll released Wednesday by the Bay Area Council, which also showed a marked increase in concern about the availability and affordability of homes compared with previous years. Curiously, the majority of residents in that poll thought more housing and a better transportation system should be built outside the Bay Area.

Neither Wunderman nor Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer, the director of San Francisco’s Housing Rights Committee, agrees with that solution. Sherburn-Zimmer says rent control, tighter eviction controls and more affordable instead of luxury housing would go a long way toward solving the problem.

“San Francisco residents know that when you build luxury housing, rents and evictions in the surrounding neighborhood go up,” she said. “They don’t want whole neighborhoods being bulldozed so you can build housing for the wealthy.”

The survey, conducted between Feb. 12 and March 9 by the Oakland research firm EMC Research, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite