The signs are about as bright as they've been for a long time. We've got the highest confidence in hiring that we've seen since we started doing the survey, with the biggest spread between employers planning to hire and those planning to diminish their workforce.
We've finally been able to get political leaders to agree that it's time for a major infrastructure investment. Things are moving in the right direction.
Transportation is something that people feel every day. It's an ugly problem. It's very, very frustrating.
This is really an emergency system. But we would have the opportunity to enhance everyday service.
What a difference three months make. This is strong news for our economy and Bay Area workers.
The Bay Area is not prepared for its next major disaster. The painful lessons that emerged from recent disasters in the United States drive our passion to protect the Bay Area. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed the unthinkable cost in terms of lives and money of haphazard planning and irresolute leadership. Not putting ferries on the Bay for disaster recovery is like New Orleans not strengthening its levees, knowing a hurricane was coming. The threats to the Bay Area are well known and we must act urgently to avoid repeating this tragedy.
The Bay Area's educational performance is showing improvement, but that's not sufficient. We've been handling, to some degree, the growth of the economy through improvements in efficiency, but that may be a slippery slope. There's clearly a need to create a housing economy that can attract more people to the region to satisfy the demands of economic growth.
Continuing historical trends, the Bay Area has clearly emerged from the most recent recession in a strong position. Bay Area employers are in the center of one of the world's most dominant and rapidly growing economic hubs. That said, economic conditions change extremely rapidly. Forces that many would argue are in our control are at this very moment rapidly eroding our economic advantage.
There's already been clear motion from housing to equities, but it isn't to the level that we can say it's part of a long-term trend.
As we suspected, that now appears to have been only a momentary shock, and the Bay Area business community expects the region's economy to steadily improve.
What a difference three months makes. This is strong news for our economy and Bay Area workers. Last quarter, with the hurricanes and spike in energy costs, local confidence plunged to the worst level in 33 months, and many survey respondents were considering postponing new hiring. As we suspected, that now appears to have been only a momentary shock, and the Bay Area business community expects the region's economy to steadily improve.
First and foremost transportation. Every time we ask, Bay Area business leaders and voters tell us that's the number one headache in the Bay Area. Number two education ... third is affordable housing.
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