A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER of Santa Clara County residents say they’re considering leaving the Bay Area, a reflection of the persistent frustration over housing costs and affordability even as population data suggests the region is not experiencing a mass exodus.

Joint Venture Silicon Valley’s annual survey found 40% of respondents in Santa Clara County said they are likely to leave in the next few years, a decline from recent years when up to 57% of respondents were looking to move. The polling was based on sentiment, not actual migration. It asked residents how crime, cost of living, housing costs, health care and child care factored into leaving Santa Clara County.

“The direction is improving,” Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, told San José Spotlight. “People are more satisfied with the Bay Area right now, or with their own situation.”

The poll surveyed 1,762 residents and has a margin of error of less than 2%, according to Joint Venture, a think tank that focuses on issues affecting Bay Area economy and quality of life. The survey was conducted via mobile devices by In Bold Research and weighted to reflect the region’s population, with additional weight to ensure underrepresented communities were accurately represented. About one-third of the questions are repeated annually to track trends over time.

“The poll doesn’t track migration patterns,” Hancock said. “It tells you what kind of mood people are in.”

That distinction is critical, Matt Regan, senior vice president of public policy for the Bay Area Council, a regional business advocacy group, said.

“Population churn has always been a characteristic of this region,” Regan told San José Spotlight. “It’s a characteristic of every dynamic economy. People come and go at higher rates.”

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Regan said the Bay Area experienced steady population growth driven largely by international immigration. But longstanding challenges, particularly the region’s failure to build enough housing to match job growth, intensified the effects of the pandemic.

“One of our principal challenges here in the Bay Area has always been our inability to match our physical growth. I mean, housing and infrastructure with our population growth,” Regan said. “We were creating multiples of jobs compared to new homes.”

When COVID-19 hit, Santa Clara County’s tech-heavy economy made it uniquely vulnerable to remote work shifts, Regan said.

“A tech-focused economy has a much higher work-from-home qualification,” he said. “Far more of our workforce could work remotely.”

As a result, the region experienced sharper population declines during the pandemic than many other parts of the country, even as tech companies continued hiring for jobs technically based in Santa Clara County but performed remotely.

Hancock said the Bay Area as a whole lost about 66,000 residents during the pandemic, though some moved to the region’s perimeter so the total number is uncertain. He cautioned that those departures were not evenly distributed across counties and do not necessarily reflect trends specific to Santa Clara County.

The Joint Venture poll found that housing affordability overwhelmingly drives residents’ desire to leave. Overall cost of living ranked first at 96%, followed by high housing costs at 53%. Crime and safety concerns were cited by 23% of respondents considering a move. Serious concern for the cost of health care overall was 73%.

A special set of questions focused on retirement showed 80% of respondents are not confident they could retire when they want due to the high cost of living.

Despite the dissatisfaction reflected in the poll, Regan cautioned against interpreting the results as economic collapse. The nearly 60,000 job loss between 2022 and 2025 was largely due to layoffs in the tech sector, and Santa Clara County remains the global center of innovation, particularly in artificial intelligence.

The poll doesn’t track migration patterns. It tells you what kind of mood people are in. Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley

However, Regan said the current tech boom has yet to translate into broad job growth.

“It’s largely been a jobless tech boom,” he said. “The investment has gone into hardware, chips and intellectual property, not headcount.”

Rising rents suggest people are beginning to return, Regan said, noting that apartment rents in San Jose have risen about 12.5% over the past two years — one of the fastest increases in the country. But he warned that the region’s increasing dependence on high-income tech workers is eroding the middle class.

“We’ve made it cost-prohibitive to make things here,” Regan said. “We need to do a much better job of diversifying our economy so every job doesn’t require a Ph.D. in engineering.”

Without that diversification, Regan said, the region risks becoming unsustainable.

“It’s not equitable, and it’s not sustainable,” he said. “Where are the teachers going to live? The firefighters? If everything requires a half-million-dollar salary, society starts to unravel.”

Contact Maryanne Casas-Perez at maryannecasasperez@gmail.com.

This story originally appeared in San José Spotlight.