Amidst boom, Midtown’s population has nearly doubled since 2000, market study finds

With cranes sprouting like weeds in Midtown, it should come as no surprise that the subdistrict is undergoing unprecedented growth, and new data published by Midtown Alliance helps put the area’s maturation into perspective.

But first, a step back.

Later this year, the City of Atlanta’s total headcount is projected to bypass its previous high of 500,000, a number we haven’t hit since the 1970s, just before citizens left en masse for the suburbs.

Over the past two decades, Midtown’s residential population has increased five times faster than Atlanta’s at large. Indications are that the growth spurt is hardly over.

Per the newly reported data, more 17,000 people live in Midtown’s core—an estimated 17,124, to be precise—which represents less than 1 percent of the city’s land area.

Compare that to the population of 2000—calculated at 9,453—and Midtown’s residential tally has nearly doubled, begging the question: Who lives there?

Graphics by Midtown Alliance

About 15 percent of those 17,000-ish folks are college students, which should come as little surprise, considering the proximity to Georgia Tech, Emory University, and Georgia State University campuses.

More room for students is on the way: Some 3,800 student housing beds are in Midtown’s development pipeline, in addition to the roughly 2,000 beds delivered since just 2015.

In fact, since just 2000, more residences have been built in Midtown than the previous five decades combined, Midtown Alliance’s research shows.

The 2000s delivered more than 5 million square feet of new residential space, and the 2010s brought almost 10 million.

In the next two years alone, more than 4 million additional residential square feet could materialize in the subdistrict, according to the report.

Midtown also has more millennials than any other generation, with people ages 23 to 38 making up 42 percent of the population. (In Atlanta overall, millennials account for just 26 percent of the population.)

Midtown Alliance’s research also indicates that 80 percent of the area’s households earn $50,000 or more annually—not shocking, considering the rising cost of living—and 77 percent have four-year college degrees.

Those figures, and the proximity to Georgia Tech, help explain while Midtown is also considered the epicenter of Atlanta’s office boom, according to a recent analysis by Newmark Knight Frank, an Atlanta commercial real estate services firm

In fact, almost 3 million square feet of office space is under construction in Midtown right now—or nearly half of the total across all of metro Atlanta.