For realtors, developers and chambers of commerce, it is enough to trigger cardiac arrest.
When it comes to the share of a metro population that is up and leaving, Atlanta ranks fifth – fifth!! A sobering 7.46 percent of residents hit the road for somewhere else, more than one of every fourteen people in the metro area, according to an analysis of Census data.
One in fourteen. Gone.
That grim little data point comes from the folks at Abodo, a four-year-old, Wisconsin-based inventory of apartments, who were curious about mobility. After all, their business kind of depends on the willingness of Americans to move.
So they crunched the numbers from the American Community Survey, a regular Census project.
And lo! Look at all those thousands of folks leaving metro Atlanta every year. Keep up that pace a few years and this’ll be a ghost town. No lines at the store, no crowds at the Falcons games, no cars on the –
Hey, wait just a second. You’ve driven on the highways, or at least crawled on them. So you know there is simply no way in the world that this area is thinning out.
None.
Then you catch your breath and read the rest of the Abodo report and realize you only had half the story. There are also, of course, a lot of people moving in.
"Atlanta … is investing huge dollar amounts into public transportation projects, along with new stadiums and other entertainment options," Sam Radbil, senior communications manager for Abodo. "Right now, it's a very trendy city and the population growth shows how attractive a destination Atlanta is for those on the move."
Between 2012 and 2015, the population of metro Atlanta expanded by 1.47 percent. Between 2014 and 2015, the population grew 0.66 percent.
Atlanta attracts people because of business headquarters, new jobs and an array of housing. Radbil said. “Our study shows that people are moving into Atlanta faster than they’re moving out
Once the inflow and outflow are combined, the metro areas with the largest population declines were Chicago, New York, Hartford, Memphis and Milwaukee, Abodo found.
The average American moves more than 11 times in his or her lifetime, according to the number-crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.
The U.S. population is among the world's most mobile, but the intra-national migration has slowed dramatically in the past few decades, according to government data analyzed by Demo Memo, a web site run by demographer Cheryl Russell.
The mobility rate fell to a new all-time low in 2015 and 2016. Only 11.2 percent of U.S. residents had moved in the previous 12 months, compared to 11.5 percent who moved in 2013–14, according to Demo Memo.
The biggest change was among renters, Russell said: the mobility rate last year was 22.9 percent – an all-time low. In 2000-2001, the rate was 30.3 percent.
As for why mobility is down, there are a number of explanations.
However, a recent paper for the Federal Reserve argues that it's not that Americans are less footloose, it's that they change jobs less often. That trend – a decline in job switching – has been going on decades, the paper says.
