Almost Half of San Francisco Bay Area Residents Want to Leave

A new poll released Sunday found that nearly half of California’s Bay Area residents want to exit the area within a few years over the cost of living and unaffordable housing prices.

Approximately 42 percent of those surveyed said housing was the main reason for their planned exodus. 18 percent said it was due to traffic and congestion, 14 percent cited poverty and homelessness, 12 percent said the cost of living was the biggest factor, and 9 percent blamed high taxes.

According to the poll, released by the Bay Area Council and Oakland-based public opinion research firm EMC Research, forty-six percent of Bay Area residents surveyed between March 20 to April 3, said they are likely to move out of the region in the next few years.

That figure is up from 40 percent last year, and 34 percent in 2016.

The poll also found that 61 percent of the 1,000 people polled indicated they would move out of the Golden State and to another state.

“It’s so expensive,” Travis Dobbs, 38, a software engineer who moved his family from Berkeley to Portland last year, told the San Jose Mercury News. “My wife and I both make good money, relatively speaking, and we can’t afford a house there.”

“Where can you find homes that are less than a million now (in the Bay Area)?” San Francisco resident Ted Heca Oili told local NBC News affiliate in the Bay Area.

In 2014, Breitbart News reported that many workers in the city of San Francisco could not afford to pay their rent, which had led to the displacement hundreds of middle class workers.

Last year, Breitbart News noted that the combination of high housing prices and the homeless epidemic in the Bay Area had contributed to a “crisis” in which trailers and recreational vehicles (RVs) had become the only viable option for residents there.

Also last year, one female Facebook contractor said she was forced to live out of her car because she could not afford the high rents in Silicon Valley, where the media platform’s headquarters are located.

In 2014, a rotting, dilapidated, 765-square-foot earthquake shack in San Francisco sold for $408,000. That same year, a tiny 180-square-foot shack listed for sale at $1.98 million.

Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.