Who’s Here? New Market Study Examines District’s Residential Profile
Published 2/6/2020
Sometime later this year, the City of Atlanta’s total population is likely to surpass its previous high-water mark of nearly 500K residents, achieved in the 1970s before the mass exodus to the suburbs. And the mixed-use Midtown core - occupying less than one percent of the City’s land area - has attracted a substantial share of new people. In fact, over the past two decades, Midtown has experienced residential population growth at a rate of 5X that of the City of Atlanta.
So, who’s living in all these new multi-family residential buildings?
Midtown Alliance worked with Bleakly Advisory Group in late-2019 on a comprehensive data-gathering project to study what’s changing about the residential population in the Midtown core. Here are a few things we learned:
1. An estimated 17K people live here, and Midtown as a share of the City’s population has steadily grown since 2000:
According to the report, 15% of Midtown residents are university students. The figure includes students living at privately-owned student housing in Midtown who claim primary residency. There are currently 3,800 student beds worth of housing development projects under construction or in the pipeline in the Midtown core, as well as some 2,000 student beds that have been delivered since 2015.
2. More housing has been built here since 2000 than the prior five decades combined:
3. Midtown has a significantly higher presence of Millennials (23-38) and Gen Xers (39-54) than the City of Atlanta overall (combined 74% in Midtown versus 50% in City):
Other Findings Worth Noting:
- 80% of Midtown households earn $50K or more annually
- 77% of Midtown residents have a 4-year college degree, and 40% have an advanced degree
- Midtown residents generate a combined demand of $359.3M in retail goods annually
This market data has many practical uses that range from ground-floor retail recruitment to public policy strategies. Read more about Midtown’s market fundamentals on our Resource Center, featuring 80+ maps, reports and fact sheets about the district.