Gwinnett County was once a smattering of predominantly white small towns, interspersed with acres of farmland. The County has however experienced significant changes over the last few decades, and is the focus of a recent article in the AJC exploring the impacts of and tensions inherent in those trends that have resulted in Gwinnett becoming one of the most diverse counties in the Southeast. One of the more striking transformations for some residents has been a shift from having a majority white population to one that is increasingly diverse. Below is a map showing census tracts in the Atlanta Metro region by percent minority* population. As the map shows, census tracts containing a majority of people belonging to a minority racial and/or ethnic group are largely concentrated in the urban core as well in the suburban counties of Clayton, Gwinnett, Cobb, Hall, Henry, Douglas, Rockdale, and Newton. For the most part, these majority-minority tracts are smaller in size and more densely populated than those that are majority non-Hispanic white. In fact, the majority minority tracts, while comprising 49% of all the region’s tracts, only account for 25% of the land area.
* “Minority” is defined here as all persons that do not self-classify as white, non-Hispanic.
The table below shows the official, adopted ARC forecasted trends for “minority” populations, by county, between 2015 and 2040. In 2015, while both the 10-county and the 20-county forecast area are both over 50% minority, only 6 of the 20 counties (with four of them”core” counties of the metro) are majority-minority. By 2040, ten of the twenty counties are forecast to be majority-minority. Between 2015 and 2040, in 14 of the 20 counties, ARC forecasts that minority populations will grow at a faster rate than will the population as a whole.
