Atlanta Population Declines For First Time in 30 Years

Metro Atlanta just logged a historic reversal. More people moved out than moved in over the past year, marking the first net loss of domestic migration for the region in at least three decades, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The decline, a modest 1,330-person dip from mid-2023 to mid-2024, signaled a potential inflection point for one of the Sun Belt’s longtime growth engines.

For years, rising housing costs in northern metros helped fuel the South’s pandemic-era population surge. Now, traffic, job-market uncertainty and a lack of affordable housing are pushing people out of Atlanta and toward smaller, cheaper cities like Chattanooga and Knoxville in Tennessee, and Greenville in South Carolina, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The slowdown is hitting real estate markets across the board.

Office vacancies in Atlanta are at 25 percent, well above the national average, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Microsoft indefinitely halted a planned 90-acre campus on the city’s Westside in 2023.

A number of Atlanta apartment developers overestimated demand; the multifamily vacancy rate jumped to 12.2 percent, up from 7.5 percent a decade ago, according to CoStar. Meanwhile, the pace of new single-family housing stock, once 3 percent annually during the city’s boom years in the 1990s and 2000s, dropped to just 0.6 percent annual growth between 2020 and 2023.

Housing affordability has become a key pressure point.

Atlanta’s home values have tripled since 2012, according to Zillow, and now exceed the national average, pricing out many would-be buyers. Census and Bank of America data suggest the pattern is playing out across other big Sun Belt metros as well, including Phoenix, Dallas and Tampa, where pandemic-era growth has cooled sharply.

Planners at the Atlanta Regional Commission acknowledge that while international immigration and births are still driving overall growth, the city is no longer the domestic migration magnet it once was. Some analysts say the office market and broader business climate may suffer as that pool of skilled newcomers shrinks.

— Judah Duke.