Bay Area Region
Decarbonization requires a larger workforce, higher technology integration skills
More than 70,000 annual job openings indicate solid economic growth. Environmental and Equity progress requires advances in workforce development to decarbonize communities and create economic mobility for their residents.
Our Process:
Three-Part Data Analysis
TESC cultivates regional collaboratives that prioritize workforce initiatives to drive the triple bottom line of Economy, Environment, and Equity
Economy
The Bay Area churned out a whopping $748 billion gross domestic product in 2017 and hit an annual growth rate of 4.3 percent during the past four years — nearly double the nation’s growth rate. Key drivers boosting growth include a high percentage of educated residents, robust pipeline of startups and a relatively diverse base of employers.
Commercial construction remains strong, rising to the demand for space being created by new business formation.
Against those strengths, the region also suffers from a core weakness: inadequate housing production. The Bay Area’s economy could have grown even faster than it did and displaced fewer people if the region added more homes to keep up with new jobs.
Growth in Construction jobs continue to outpace increases in the labor pool, creating significant employment opportunities and associated economic benefits.
Environment
The Bay Area has significant capital and technological resources to help address the region’s clean energy and pollution challenge. Workforce capacity and competence continues to be a major issue, one that’s created the need for action by TESC and its collaborators.
What is the challenge? The San Francisco Bay Area Summary Report (August 2018) bullets the effects of climate change that residents are already experiencing:
- The area’s average annual maximum temperature has increased by 1.7°F since 1950;
- Coastal fog is less frequent;
- Sea level in the Bay has risen 8 inches in the last 100 years;
- The 2015-16 El Niño storms created waves with energy 50 percent larger than average, driving unprecedented beach erosion;
- The area burned in “large-fire” years in the Bay Area has steadily increased over the past 80 years.
Equity
Rising inequality, stagnant wages, and persistent racial inequities have put the long-term future of the booming Bay Area economy at risk, a report from PolicyLink and the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) at the University of Southern California finds.
The report examined regional demographic trends and indicators of economic vitality, career readiness, and connectedness and found that while closing racial income gaps would boost the regional economy by nearly $138 billion, job growth is not keeping up with population growth, that black and Latino workers have seen the hourly wages fall between 2000 and 2014, and that income inequality in the region is worsening.
The report’s authors further argue that achieving full racial economic inclusion and equity could double annual incomes for black and Latino residents, with all residents of the region seeing an average increase of 33.7 percent.
Source: An Equity Profile of the Five-County San Francisco Bay Area Region
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