Six and a half years into Plan Bay Area, the 30-year San Francisco Bay Area blueprint for bringing together adequate new jobs and homes, the nine-county region continues to add workers at a record rate but fails to provide anywhere near enough housing. As of June 2017, the Bay Area had already added 42 percent of all the new jobs projected for the region through 2040. On the housing side, local jurisdictions had approved 30 percent fewer homes than what what was needed to keep pace with Plan Bay Area household projections. But as terrible as this percentage is, it grossly understates the true housing need because the actual number of new workers is far higher than what was anticipated in the plan. The Bay Area since 2011 created 531,400 new jobs but only permitted 123,801 new housing units: This adds up to a ratio of 4.3 jobs per housing unit, a rate well in excess of a healthy balance of 1.5 jobs per housing unit. Click here to download the June 2017 Bay Area Jobs-Housing ‘Balance’ chart. For questions or comments, contact BIA’s Lisa Vorderbrueggen at lvorderbrueggen@biabayarea.org or 925-348-1956.
