Continued growth will transform metro Atlanta, and the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) projects 1.8 million new residents across the 21-county region by 2050.
The increase would bring the regional population to 7.9 million, but to accommodate that growth, Georgia Tech experts say improvements in the housing, transportation, and labor markets must be made.
Housing
The five-county core around Atlanta — Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb, and Clayton — will account for nearly half of the new residents and continues to grow. Gregory Randolph, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning, says the region must start by reexamining its approach to urbanism as new census data shows Atlanta has become the sixth most-populated metro area in the country.
“For the second half of the 20th century, little of the population growth in metro Atlanta was happening in the City of Atlanta, but that has changed over the past two decades. With the urban core growing, we have an opportunity. to pursue a different kind of urban form that is higher density and more walkable. A lot of the recent growth in Atlanta is adding density without necessarily improving the quality of urbanism.”
He explains that, especially in downtown Atlanta, retrofitting existing properties will play a key role in transforming neighborhoods through the replacement of “lower-value infrastructure,” such as surface parking lots, with higher-density housing. In a post-pandemic environment, the conversion of office space to mixed-use properties is emerging as a strategy in urban areas like Atlanta.
A 2023 report identified the need for 391,878 housing units within the five-county core at the current population level. Mike Dobbins, professor of the practice in the School of City and Regional Planning, credits efforts made by the mayor’s office and nonprofit organizations such as the Urban Land Institute to…
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