One-third ponder leaving Bay Area amid costs, congestion
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Cost-of-living-traffic-have-a-third-of-Bay-Area-7386717.php
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....
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.
If they'd get up and go, they'd take the congestion with them. But then they'd see what a congestion-free Bay Area looks like and come flooding back!
