The Atlanta Regional Commission’s annual population estimates released on July 10 show the region added 62,700 residents between April 2023 and April 2024, a slight downtick in growth from 2022-2023.
But the population estimates were not officially voted on by the ARC board at the July 10 joint Atlanta Regional Commission and Transportation and Air Quality Committee meeting due to a lack of quorum. The board will vote on the estimates at a special called meeting on August 28.
The estimates were still presented, though, and show a total population of 5.2 million across the 11-county Metro Atlanta region, including Fayette, Clayton, Henry, Rockdale Forsyth, Cherokee, Cobb, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Douglas, and Fulton counties.
ARC leaders said it’s a time of “steady, consistent growth” for the region. The rates are nowhere near the population “explosion” in the 1990s that outpaced most other metropolitan areas in the country.
“Despite being the third or so largest single-year increase in decades, it’s actually a little bit less than it was last year,” Managing Director of the Research and Analytics Department Mike Carnathan said.
Housing has been a roadblock for the city. A lack of available units and hefty home price tags have acted as a ��brake” for growth — the median listing home price in Atlanta was $415,000 in January, according to a report from Realtor.com.
“We’ve been underbuilding in housing for 15 years now, and that’s going to be driving up home prices,” Carnathan said.
The city of Atlanta still dwarfs other cities in the region when it comes to permitting. In 2023, 28,595 residential building permits were issued across the entire 11-county region – Atlanta held just over 7,500 of them.
It also has the largest chunk of multifamily housing developments in progress with 6.482 compared to 1,139 in the city limits. Gwinnett saw significant permitting with 5,423 new permits, but over 4,000 of them went to single-family homes. Other counties like Fayette, Rockdale and Cherokee saw little to no multifamily permits.
Overall though, the number of permits issued decreased by 7,500 from 2022.
Carnathan said the region must continue to invest in housing affordability supply for both home buyers and renters. Still, he made clear the estimates didn’t come as a surprise.
“This isn’t unplanned growth,” Carnathan said. “We’re not reacting to the growth that we got last year; we actually foresaw that 20 years ago.”
However, the region will need to be able to accommodate that growth. That’s where long-term investments like the BeltLine, first envisioned decades ago, come into play.
“You have to invest in your communities; you have to invest in your infrastructure, right,” Carnathan said. “If you don’t, you will not be able to accommodate that population.”
Atlanta is also “middle of the road” when it comes to jobs, which have increased 6.4 percent since the pandemic began in 2020. With career availability and major infrastructure projects like the BeltLine continuing across several decades, Carnathan said the population will trend towards slow and steady growth, continuing towards a 7.9 million expected population by 2050.
“People from around the country are choosing metro Atlanta because of our great quality of life and our dynamic, diverse economy,” Atlanta Mayor and ARC Board Chair Andre Dickens said. “Of course, our continued growth is not guaranteed. We must continue to invest in our region’s infrastructure to ensure a successful future.”
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