According to a new migration study of the Atlanta area, people from out of state prefer to move to the city's "core," while core residents head for the suburbs, and people living in the suburbs head for other parts of Georgia.
What's more, "Among migrants within the Atlanta region, whites were far more likely to prefer the urban core, while blacks were more likely to prefer the suburbs," according to the study's author, Lyman Stone, who also analyzed statewide migration trends.
His Atlanta data is drawn from the American Community Survey County-to-County Migration Flows Data, 2006-2010, while his statewide data comes from the American Community Survey County-to-County Migration Flows Data, 2008-2012. You can download the source data here.
One note: Stone's piece has its pecularities, particularly with how it classifies different parts of metro Atlanta. He atypically includes Cobb County as part of the city's "core," along with DeKalb and Fulton, because of its access to public transit, according to the service maps he referenced. (To that point, Stone said that even counting Cobb as a suburb wouldn't "radically" change the results.) Gwinnett is also broken out as its own area. The "suburbs" cover everything else.
It's this additional distinction that Stone, who is in the middle of an ongoing series on national migration, highlights: "Migration within Greater Atlanta has a measurable and significant racial bias. ... About 10 [percent] of the migration in Atlanta involves some kind of racially-biased relocation."
Annually, this net totals about 18,000 people.
"Migration within Atlanta is impacted by numerous factors, from transportation access to cost of living to education. But race is also a major factor, and one concerning which any Southern city must, for historical reasons, take extraordinary care," Stone wrote. "Is Atlanta doing a good job measuring up to that task? That’s up to residents to say: hopefully the data I’ve presented here can be useful for informing that discussion."
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