The Atlanta Regional Commission forecasts that the 21-county region will add 1.8 million people and grow to a total of about 7.9 million by the year 2050.[2] How would growth be this strong if nationwide birth rates are in decline? The answer is simple: migration, and particularly of the domestic variety. But where are these new residents coming from?
To investigate this question, we turn to the recently released 2018-22 Census Bureau’s State-to-County Migration Flows data, a special tabulation of the American Community Survey. This dataset provides the state of origin and county of destination for people who moved during the previous year.[3]
Figure 1 below presents domestic in-migration to the 21-county ARC region using the “Desire Lines” function within Maptitude GIS. The thickness of each line is proportional to the number of new Atlantans from each state.
Figure 1: In-migration to the 21-County Atlanta Region by Previous State of Residence
As this map (Figure 1 above) shows, the largest in-migrations to our region come from the most populous states (California, Texas, New York) as well as our closest neighbors (the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Alabama). And Florida, which is both populous and a neighbor is our number-one supplier of new Atlantans.
Figure 2 shows the same data, only in tabular format and on a percentage basis.
Figure 2: Top 10 Previous States of Residence for In-migration to the 21-County Atlanta Region
| Rank | State | Percent of Total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florida | 13.7 |
| 2 | California | 7.4 |
| 3 | Texas | 5.9 |
| 4 | New York | 5.3 |
| 5 | North Carolina | 4.8 |
| 6 | Tennessee | 3.9 |
| 7 | South Carolina | 3.8 |
| 8 | Alabama | 3.3 |
| 9 | New Jersey | 3.1 |
| 10 | Illinois | 3.1 |
As the table above shows, the top 10 states provide over half (about 54%) of the new Atlanta residents via domestic migration.
Footnotes:
[1] Where the players play (Dupri et al., 2002).
[2] Delve into the currently adopted ARC forecast data with the Series 17 Forecast Dashboard.
[3] Migration within, to, and from Connecticut was suppressed in the latest (2018-22) data product due to undergoing changes in geographic reporting for that state.