Atlanta exurb population boom? or just voter turnout surge?

[RBH]

Forsyth County: 23K votes in 1996, 36K votes in 2000, 57K votes in 2004
Paulding County: 18K in 96, 24K in 00, 41K in 04
Henry County: 29K in 96, 39K in 00, 64K in 04
Cherokee County: 39K in 96, 52K in 00, 74K in 04
Newton County: 15K in 96, 18K in 00, 29K in 04

All five counties are reasonably close to Atlanta.

And there appears to be a huge population increase in the Atlanta metro area, although maybe Georgia just had an incredibly high voter turnout for the 2004 election.

[Alcon]

Huge boom.  Population change, 2000-2006 (too lazy to look this up for 2004):

Forsyth: +53.4%
Paulding: +48.9%
Henry: +49.2%
Cherokee: +37.6%
Newton: +47.5%

[Tender Branson]

Just look at Georgia as a whole. The state had 8.2 Mio. inhabitans in 2000 and will probably have 10.5 Mio. in 2010, an increase of more than 2 Mio. people, most of them in the Atlanta region. Georgia will be bigger than Michigan then and it will be the 5th largest state in the US by 2030.

In the 2000-2010 time span, the Atlanta region is probably second only to LA when it comes to Numerical Population Change, overtaking New York and Dallas and staying ahead of Phoenix and Houston. The region will have about 6 Mio. inhabitants in 2010. Therefore: Big Population Boom in Atlanta.

[John Dibble]

Yeah, definitely population change - I can attest to it. Henry county has grown by leaps and bounds since I started living there when I was five.

[Adam Griffin]

It's growing extremely fast. One thing that helps is that the Atlanta Metropolitan Area is the 4th largest in the world in terms of square miles, behind only New York City, Tokyo, & Chicago. My county alone in the past 15 years has grown from 73,000 to 95,000, and that doesn't include the estimated 30,000-40,000 undocumented immigrants we have here in the county itself, and we're just a moderate-sized blip on the map.