Our final segment of our population decline series is here! To start with the conclusion, population growth in our region is going to be quite moderate for the 2020-2021 period—in fact, it will be lower than any year in quite some time. This conclusion will not surprise you, if you are a devoted reader of this page. As a reminder,  population growth comes from two things: natural increase (births minus deaths) and net migration . We already know that births are down (Chart 1 and for even more our recent post), and that deaths are up (see Chart 2 or our even more recent post). And way back in April, the very early data coming out at the state level from the 2020 Census gave us a clue, before we even started into the details.

So there’s a refresher on the evidence that natural increase is down. But what about that second element: net migration? As we hinted at in the post of earlier this week, that is down too, and down more than natural increase is. Take a look at Chart 3, which compares natural increase to net migration in our 11-county area. There are fewer people moving into Atlanta in the last few years (2018-2019) than in the early in the decade when there were lingering effects from the Great Recession. In the “heyday” (in terms of the past 10 years) at mid-decade, net migration was a significantly larger source of population growth than natural increase was.

Looking deeper into the elements of migration (Chart 4), it’s notable that international migration has been more inconsistent and a less reliable growth input (given the unstable policy climate and economy of the past ten years) than domestic migration. Yet in two of the past three years (2018 and 2020), even with international migration’s restrictions, there has still more net inflow from abroad than from other areas within the USA.

So things are not looking groovy for strong or even solid growth in the past year and, going forward, in the new few years. Table 1 sums it up across the growth components. In 2019-2020, most of the region’s jurisdictions experienced poor results—if not the worst year of the decade—in two or even more of the growth elements. That is, areas tended to have at least one of the following conditions: low births, high number of deaths, and/or limited net migration. Only the 2011-2012 year comes close in the weakness of overall estimated population increase. And with the continuing effects of many of the negative impacts of COVID into this year (2021)—e.g. public heath concerns, high housing prices, and job loss or stasis—many of these trends/patterns are likely to continue, short-term.

So now you have a pretty good idea of what to expect (and why) in the general results of a key forthcoming ARC data product: our annual major jurisdiction population estimates for 2021. We will be releasing those in late August, as we are going to wait for the official Census redistricting information to come out on August 16 and realign the 2020 baseline to allow us  to finalize our 2021 numbers. While “nothing is over till we say it is” (to echo John Belushi in Animal House), all signs are pointing to some growth, but not that much of it compared to what we have gotten used to since the impacts of the Great Recession began to fade.