Atlanta is one of the most relocated-to metros in the country, and if you are reading this you are probably trying to work out whether you should be one of those people. So why is everyone moving to Atlanta? In my experience there are really only four reasons.
I help a lot of clients relocate here from other states, and they all arrive for different reasons on paper. But the same four themes come up over and over. I am going to walk through them in the order I actually hear them, from least common to most common, so you can see where your own reasons land.
One note before we start. I filmed the video this post is based on in August 2023, so the numbers below are 2023 numbers. Treat them as a sense of scale rather than today’s price sheet.
Reason 4: Culture and diversity
If you follow music or pop culture at all, you already know Atlanta has been sitting near the center of it. Hip hop and rap in particular. There is a local saying that Atlanta influences everything, and it holds up.
This is a genuinely creative city, and it fosters creativity, entrepreneurship and talent. That is a real draw for younger people especially, and for anyone moving from a small town or a quieter city into somewhere that feels alive.
The diversity piece, honestly
I want to be careful here rather than sweeping. We are not a true melting pot in the way New York is. But we are diverse, and in particular we are one of the blackest cities in America.
What matters is not just that there are a lot of black people in Atlanta. It is that there are black people thriving at every level of society here: doctors, lawyers, entertainers, business owners, entrepreneurs, professors, tradespeople, everyday retail workers.
I am white, so I can only speak very little to that experience. It is not mine. But I have lived here long enough to understand how much that must mean to someone coming from a city or a neighborhood where they see far fewer people who look like them at every level.
There is also the history. From Martin Luther King to John Lewis, the Civil Rights Movement is woven into the fabric of this city, and that struggle and those stories are part of why people choose it.
And it is not only a black and white city. We have a large Asian population and a large gay population. Midtown in particular, and other areas inside the perimeter, are places a lot of people feel accepted. Yes, we are in the South, and there are negative stereotypes attached to that. In the city itself, my experience is that people find more acceptance than they expected, especially coming from a smaller town.
Reason 3: The weather
I always get pushback from locals on this one, but I will say it anyway: Atlanta has a mild climate.
Mild does not mean flat. We have four distinct seasons. This is not Los Angeles, where it is sunny and 70 all year. We get spring, summer, fall and winter, and they feel different from each other. What we do not get are the extremes of the Northeast, where I grew up, with a crazy summer on one end and a crazy winter on the other.
Here is roughly how the year runs:
- Spring and fall are, to me, perfect. Seventies, breezy, sunny, comfortable.
- Winter gets a little cold, but it only drops below freezing a couple of days a year. You might get flurries once or twice. There is no significant snowfall. Winter here is short, chilly, rainy, and over before you notice it.
- Summer is long and it is hot.
The honest downside
Summer is the part people underestimate. It gets very humid, and if you are coming from a drier climate like the Pacific Northwest, the humidity may be a lot to handle. When I filmed this on August 28th, 2023, it was genuinely bad, and I believe that was the hottest year on record across the country at the time.
So summer is the tradeoff. But it is not Florida, where the humidity runs all year. You get real seasonal variety here, and after 15 years of living in Atlanta this is still one of my favorite things about it.
Reason 2: Cost of living
Locals will tell you how much the cost of living has climbed compared to a few years ago, and they are not wrong. But I help a lot of people coming from California, New York, Chicago and Texas, and relative to those places, Atlanta is still comparatively affordable.
What buying looked like in 2023
When I filmed this in 2023, the average sale price in the Atlanta area was about $400,000. You can picture what $400,000 does or does not buy you in Southern California, which is where a lot of my clients are coming from.
You also do not need $400,000 to own here. If you are open to an attached home, meaning a condo or a townhome rather than a detached single-family house, you could buy inside the perimeter in 2023 in the mid $200,000s, maybe even the low $200,000s.
Inside the perimeter, or ITP, means inside I-285, the interstate that loops around the city. Locals treat that loop as the dividing line for the whole metro, and OTP means outside it.
The honest version of that mid $200,000s home: it is smaller, it is attached, and it may not be updated. The point is not that it is a dream house. The point is that you can own property in a major metro that is growing fast, with real opportunity, without being a millionaire. If you want to think through that tradeoff properly, my buying and selling guide is the place to start.
What renting looked like in 2023
Rent has gone up a lot over the last decade. Still, these were the 2023 numbers I was seeing:
- A room, if you are bargain hunting at the bottom of the market: roughly $700 to $800.
- A studio or one bedroom in Buckhead: around $1,200 to $1,300.
- A studio or one bedroom in other areas inside the perimeter: closer to $1,000 to $1,100.
- An entire detached single-family house: a budget of $2,000 to $3,000.
That last one is the number that surprises people most, because in a lot of expensive metros it does not exist at any price.
Property taxes
This is the one I get comments about constantly, especially from people coming out of Texas and Chicago. They are shocked at how low Georgia property taxes are.
Locals will again push back, because their own tax bills have climbed significantly in recent years. Both things are true. Here is my own data point: I own a fairly typical three bedroom, two bath house right in the heart of the city, and when I filmed this in 2023 my property taxes were under $2,000 a year. They had gone up significantly, and they were still under $2,000.
You are generally not looking at $7,500, $10,000, or $15,000 to $20,000 a year the way you might be elsewhere. If you buy a mansion in Alpharetta you might pay $8,000 to $10,000 a year. But at the average price point, on an average home, you are more likely looking at a few thousand dollars.
All of that is highly variable by the price of the home and by the county and city it sits in. Do not treat any of these as your number. Get the actual figure for the actual address.
Reason 1: The jobs
The number one reason people relocate to Atlanta is work.
It is not just that the economy is strong. It is that it is diverse. We are not dependent on a single industry the way some cities depend on shipping, or banking, or healthcare. We have TV and film, media, healthcare, banking, higher education, shipping and logistics, and tech, IT and software. If one sector goes down, Atlanta is not crippled.
Twenty-six Fortune 1000 companies are headquartered here, and 18 of those are in the Fortune 500. Coke, Home Depot, Delta, UPS, Chick-fil-A, and it keeps going. Over the years leading up to when I filmed this in 2023, the metro had consistently beaten the national average on unemployment.
Major tech companies have been increasing their presence here too. Google and Facebook have been setting up shop and building out secondary headquarters. The reason is talent. We have Georgia Tech, and we have the historically black colleges and universities, meaning schools founded to serve black students, several of which are here in Atlanta. Between them, this city produces some of the most diverse tech talent in the country, and those companies want access to it.
That is the reason I am bullish on Atlanta’s continued growth. A strong foundation across multiple industries is what makes an economy durable, not one good sector.
If you are looking to take the next step in your career, or to start your own business, I can tell you personally as someone who has done that: there is a lot of room here. It is fairly wide open for anyone who wants to make something happen.
So why is everyone moving to Atlanta?
The culture and the diversity. The mild climate, summer included. A cost of living that is still relatively low compared with the metros most of my clients are leaving. And above all, the jobs and the economy behind them.
If you want more of the ground-level picture before you decide, I wrote a longer piece on what it is actually like living in Atlanta.
And if you want to talk through your own move, whether Atlanta is the right fit and which part of the metro suits you, set up a call with me. I love it when viewers become clients.