Metro Atlanta grew by growing its own, as the 10-county region added 37,200 residents.
"These numbers are not a reflection of [migration], but of natural increase," said Mike Alexander, the research division chief at the Atlanta Regional Commission.
Natural increase is a demographer's way of saying babies.
Between April 2011 and April 2012 the region grew significantly slower than in the boom years from 1990 to 2006, when the recession struck. During the 2000s, the region routinely added more than 100,000 people each year, and counties from Gwinnett to Cherokee made lists of fastest growing counties in the United States.
At the height of growth, Gwinnett County averaged 22,000 new people a year. In the latest count, it grew by 9,000, ARC numbers say. Cobb's and Fulton's growth has slowed similarly. The former is growing less than half as fast as it did between 1990 and 2010, now adding an average of 5,711 a year. Fulton is growing about one-third as fast as it did during that the boom times, adding an annual average of 7,760 new residents.
The ARC assists local governments in planning everything from road improvements to economic development, collecting data from a range of records: birth and death certificates; building permits; and U.S. Postal vacancy data to create the estimates.
The agency contends the flatness of the regional economy is directly tied to the economic downturn, and it continues to project 3 million more people regionally by 2040.
"People just don't move as much when the economy is slow," Alexander said.
The Atlanta region hasn't done well at creating jobs recently, said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University.
Dhawan said the region had plenty of assets to offer employers. Metro Atlanta has high-quality higher-education institutions, which offer a good workforce for higher-paying, higher-skill but still entry level jobs. It is a transportation hub with close proximity to both markets and suppliers.
And with all deference to promoters of the regional transportation sales tax that failed last week, he doubted traffic gridlock would dampen an economic rebound because most jobs are created locally.
"New companies moving in are just icing on the cake," he said. "And transportation is important but it is not on the top of the list when a company decides to relocate. If traffic was the issue, there would have never been a Silicon Valley."
University of Georgia demographer Doug Bachtel, however, warned some trends don't bode well for future growth. Atlanta, and Georgia in general, have high high-school dropout rates which don't lend themselves to attracting factories or high-tech companies, he said.
Under the new federally mandated formula, Georgia's 2011 graduation rate trails in the southeast at 67.4 percent — with a number of metro Atlanta schools substantially below that percent.
"When you have this rather large, uneducated, unskilled population, it doesn't fit the growing nature of business in this county, which is technology driven," Bachtel said.
Rampant overbuilding by developers first inflated the economy after the tech-stock bubble burst and the 2001 terrorist attacks. Then the overbuilding tanked the economy when the slow-down happened, Dhawan said.
The real-estate market, despite an uptick this year, will still take years to recover because of excess housing, said Steve Palm of Smart Numbers, a real-estate reporting company.
The region is still growing the old-fashioned way.
Lucy Baker, born about 10 a.m. Thursday, was one of the latest to add her name to the rolls. She is the third child of Brian and Kimberly Baker, and the 100,000th baby born at Gwinnett Medical Center since 1991.
Like the general growth rate, the number of babies born there has slumped with the recession, from a high in 2008 of 6,332 to to 2011 4,914 last year.
The Bakers, unlike the new arrivals that flooded the region during the boom years, are native Georgians.
"We are Atlantans through and through," Brian Baker said. "We are almost as happy that the Falcons have a pre-season game tonight as we are that the baby was born."
Staff Writer Christopher Quinn contributed to this report.
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