Local employment figures reported Friday showed that San Francisco and the western Bay Area — which includes San Mateo and Marin Counties — are doing quite well, with improving employment stats that are much better than the state and even national averages.

Things in Silicon Valley are so frothy that home prices in towns like Palo Alto are surging as emboldened techies go shopping.

So why are folks here so glum?

The University of San Francisco issued its inaugural Bay Area Regional Survey a few days ago, and it found residents of those same western counties to be particularly pessimistic.

In San Francisco, 35 percent of those surveyed said the local economy was doing either “pretty poorly” or “very poorly.”

In San Mateo County, home to many Silicon Valley companies, 31 percent of respondents thought their local economy was in poor shape.

Meanwhile, the state employment data released Friday morning shows that the San Francisco-San Mateo metropolitan area had an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent in May, compared to 8.8 percent a year ago.

The area is faring considerably better than the state as a whole. Statewide unemployment was at 11.7 percent in May, down slightly from 11.8 percent in April and significantly better than the 12.4 percent unemployment rate in May 2010. Nationally, the unemployment rate for May actually increased, to 9.1 percent.

But the local economy's relatively strong jobs outlook seems to be lost on residents.

“They are really glum,” said USF professor Corey Cook, who co-authored the study. “Looking at the county breakdowns, there is not much correlation between how things are at the county level and people’s sense of how things are going.”

“It’s a reflection of insecurity. It takes a while to rebuild confidence in the economy,” Cook said.

Marin is a bit of an exception: It has the region’s lowest unemployment rate, at 7.4 percent, and just 15 percent of residents reported that the local economy was doing “poorly.”

In the eastern half of the Bay Area, where the economic picture is indeed weaker, the USF study found residents to be slightly more downbeat.

“The Bay Area as whole is doing pretty well,” Cook said, but “the further you are from Silicon Valley and San Francisco, the less positive people are.”

The housing market crash hit the far-eastern edge of the Bay Area much more brutally than the western counties, a fact that will delay economic recovery in those areas.

Solano County had the highest unemployment rate for the Bay Area, at 11.3 percent. But the USF study did not include Solano County, so there is no telling how depressed folks there might be.