Fastest Growing U.S. Metros: Atlanta tops all

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Atlanta growth tops in nation

By BRIAN FEAGANS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/05/07
When Detroit accountant David Gibson married a Midtown Atlanta legal secretary a couple of years ago, his bride began preparing for a move to the Motor City.

Then it snowed.

"She changed her mind," Gibson said Wednesday, pumping his fist up and down at a Subway restaurant in Gwinnett County. "I was like, 'Yes' "

Gibson, 46, wasn't the only one who said "yes" to Atlanta.

No other metro area in the country added more residents — roughly 890,000 — between 2000 to 2006, according to U.S. Census Bureau city rankings released today. Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., rounded out the top five.

Atlanta's surge has pushed the area above the 5 million-person mark, the census reported last month, to an estimated 5,138,000 in July 2006. That has led to less desirable No. 1 rankings — in average commute time increases, for example. But the region's continued magnetism speaks to its resilience in the face of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and dot-com industry woes, forces that since 2000 have crippled growth in many other cities.

"I think there was some talk a couple years ago that the bloom was off the rose in metro Atlanta," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "I think these numbers show that's not true."

Atlanta is now the clear leader in a national population shift toward the South and Sunbelt, Frey said. Many newcomers to the 28 counties of metro Atlanta have arrived from old economy cities around the Great Lakes. Others are fleeing the expensive housing bubbles of the Northeast in favor of Atlanta's comparatively cheap houses, Frey said.

As a result, since 2000, metro Atlanta has vaulted to No. 9 nationally in total population, passing Boston and Detroit.

Even New York, the nation's most populous metro area at 18.8 million, has mustered only half the increase that Atlanta has this decade.

The growth has challenged school systems and transportation officials to keep up, said Mike Alexander, chief of the research division at the Atlanta Regional Commission planning agency. Trailer classrooms and traffic jams are a daily reality in many parts of the region.

But the good news, Alexander said, is that people have had enough confidence to move here despite slower job growth than in the late 1990s. And now there are signs that employment is catching up, he said, with Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport recovered from the post-Sept. 11 slump and Delta Air Lines expected to emerge from bankruptcy this spring. "We've honestly already taken our hit on the tech sector," he said.

While roughly a third of metro Atlanta's growth came in the form of births, newcomers from outside the region drove most of the increase, the census figures revealed.

Soo Kwon of Duluth said she and her husband spent a decade in Chicago before moving to Atlanta last year in search of investment opportunities in the region's growing Korean community. Now Kwon, 36, is working as a clerk at Maum, an upscale cafe near Doraville filled with Midwestern transplants. Her husband works in commercial real estate.

Kwon recalled hearing about Atlanta's fabulous weather from friends who moved here four years earlier. Chicago, she said, was simply too cold.

Chalk up another one to the snow.