MENLO PARK — Close to 30 percent of the Bay Area’s residents aren’t able to make ends meet as they contend with high housing costs, suggesting poverty is more widespread in the region than official reports indicate, according to a study published Wednesday.

The report by JobTrain, a Menlo Park-based nonprofit organization, estimated that 29.2 percent of Bay Area residents, or roughly 1.45 million people, are not self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency, the study’s authors said, is defined as having a stable place to live and being able to cover the basics for survival.

JobTrain hopes its report, “The Broken Pathway: Uncovering the Economic Inequality in the Bay Area,” will highlight the challenges facing many residents of the nine-county region.

“The problem is much larger than the number of people who are living in poverty in the Bay Area,” said Nora Sobolov, president of JobTrain. “The poverty rate and the unemployment rate don’t tell the full story.”

Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, agrees that the challenges are more complex than simple calculations regarding the strength of the region’s job market and the number of people living in poverty in the area.

What’s more, this is a problem that may be getting worse due to a surge in the Silicon Valley tech sector and jobs throughout the Bay Area, Levy warned.

“This is a housing-cost problem,” Levy said. “High costs for homes and rentals are pushing people into distress economically.”

Long and crushing commutes often are the only option for employees who can’t afford to live near their workplaces.

The squeeze may be worst for middle-class workers. People with mid-range wages sometimes can’t generate enough cash flow to cough up the money needed for mortgages or monthly rents, let alone for a down payment on a typical Bay Area residence.

Those with mid-range wages, however, also make too much money to qualify for an array of government subsidies, programs and benefits that have been crafted to ease the poverty pinch, experts say.

In the Bay Area, thousands of residents facing economic distress don’t quality for many government-funded work or training services, the report said.

What’s more, federal officials may tend to not allocate sufficient resources to the Bay Area, whose job market is growing at roughly double the national employment market and is outpacing California.

“There is a perverse disconnect in the federal funding formula for workforce development that punishes the Bay Area due to low unemployment and poverty rates,” said Kris Stadelman, executive director of Sunnyvale-based NOVA Workforce Development.

The government’s reliance on official benchmarks and little else also poses problems for people who seek training.

The official poverty-level benchmark is $24,000 for a household of four people. But the study determined that the actual wage levels for living in the Bay Area are much higher, depending on where the family is located.

The necessary household family annual income to be self-sufficient, however, is $78,000 for Alameda County, $84,000 for San Francisco, $86,000 for Santa Clara County and $89,000 for San Mateo County, the JobTrain study estimated.

About half of the Bay Area’s residents over 25 years of age don’t have a bachelor’s degree. As a result, the report recommended training initiatives to help people achieve the wages needed to live here, the report said.

Training efforts should focus on helping people obtain jobs in construction, health-care support, office administration and computer technology, the report suggested.

“The Bay Area has benefited from technological change and innovation in an increasingly global economy,” the report stated. “These changes have left significant parts of the workforce behind by making it more difficult for them to find good jobs.”