Declining trust in Bay Area economy, poll finds

Even as a well-paid software engineer at Google, Jake Hamby said living in the Bay Area had become suffocating. He came to San Francisco in 2005 and felt it gradually lose its luster.

“There’s a weird gap (between) people that have hundreds of millions and $150,000 a year,” Hamby said from Los Angeles, where he recently moved and is looking for a job. “It’s still a lot of money, but people are being priced out of the market.” That in turn, he said, makes the Bay Area “less exciting.”

As Hamby’s experience reflects, the frustrations of living in the Bay Area have become so pronounced that confidence in the economy has sunk to its lowest level in four years, according to a survey released Saturday by the Bay Area Council.

Housing and traffic concerns have usually topped the list, but they have intensified this year. In 2014, 53 percent of respondents said they felt the economy was doing better than it was in the previous six months. According to the survey, only 31 percent of respondents feel that way today.

The Bay Area has had a

strong run since the recession. San Francisco’s unemployment rate is astonishingly low, at 3 percent.

But for the first time in four years, the Bay Area has failed to create more jobs than it lost, according to analysis of state jobs data by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. The analysis projects that the region will create 86,000 jobs this year — a significant decline from 142,000 in 2016.

While companies like Uber, Facebook, Airbnb and Google have attracted talent to the area, experts now worry about losing people like Hamby, who have become disillusioned.

John Grubb, chief operating officer of the Bay Area Council, said the Bay Area is getting in the way of its own success by not investing enough in housing and transportation.

“Millennials can’t afford to live here,” he said. “And that will hurt our economy because that’s our future economic growth . ... This drop in confidence seems to be self-inflicted.”

Nupur Dave, who also worked for Google, recently moved out of the area and back home to Los Angeles. While she loved her job, she said, it was hard to justify the steep rent and two-hour commute to work.

“I didn’t feel like that was the life I wanted to enjoy,” Dave, 34, said from Bangalore, India, where she moved in September.

The Bay Area’s population growth is also starting to slow, according census data released last month, with more people leaving than arriving in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Marin counties.

Karen Chapple, a UC Berkeley professor of city and regional planning, said she is not surprised that economic confidence has slipped.

“If you think about the indicators that we’ve seen in the last few months, it’s not really that surprising,” she said. “We’re due for a downturn . ... It’s not really a surprise that our expectations would be changing and our confidence would be changing. There’s been people talking about when is the bubble going to pop.”

Chapple said the Bay Area has stronger fundamentals than it did during the first dot-com bubble.

“It’s not like Google and Facebook are going away — there is a much more solid base,” she said. “We’re not likely going to see a loss of the amount of tech jobs like we did in 2000. Instead, it’ll be more of a correction.”

Even if the Bay Area avoids an economic downturn, Hamby said, he doesn’t see himself returning soon.

“I (was) living, surviving, but it wasn’t the life I wanted,” he said.