Bay Area Optimism Up but Trails Southland’s

Southern Californians feel more upbeat than their northern neighbors about their household finances. Still, the hard-hit residents of the Bay Area are growing more confident that their regional recession is easing, a report by a San Jose State University think tank said Wednesday.

“There’s a greater sense of optimism than a sense of current comfort in the North,” said Philip J. Trounstine, director of the university’s Survey and Policy Research Institute, which released the first of its planned quarterly statewide consumer confidence surveys.

The snapshot, taken last week of 1,130 consumers, shows that 46% of Southern California families consider themselves better off than a year earlier, compared with 37% in the north. And when asked about the near future, 43% of Northern Californians say they expect improvements in the next 12 months, while 48% of Southern Californians see better times ahead.

The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9%.

The mood in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco is significantly less upbeat than in the Bay Area overall. In Silicon Valley, 39% of respondents expect financial improvements in 2004, compared with 28.5% who say they’re now doing better than last year. The figures are about the same in San Francisco.

Southern California is healthier because its economy is more diversified than Northern California’s, economists say. What’s more, Los Angeles and the surrounding counties have had more time to recover from a deep downturn in the aerospace and financial sectors in the early 1990s, a period when business boomed for Northern California’s computer and software companies.

“What we had was a boom and then a tremendous bust in Silicon Valley and the whole Bay Area, with lots of jobs lost,” said Brad Williams, economist for the state Legislative Analyst’s Office. Now the San Jose State survey appears to confirm that Northern California consumers are heartened by the rebounding U.S. economy, Williams noted.

“It wouldn’t take much for people to think that things are getting better,” said Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce.