With real estate development is surging across America, StorageCafe conducted a study on construction in the 50 largest metros — and among them, Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta ranks fifth for growth. The industry blog analyzed construction in U.S. cities across six sectors (single-family, multifamily, office, industrial, retail and self-storage) over the last decade to determine the list.
In Atlanta, expansion was powered by both the residential and the industrial sectors. Building permits for more than 222,000 single-family homes and almost 88,000 multifamily units were issued during the last 10 years. Reflecting trends seen across most of the country, residential construction shot up in Atlanta during the pandemic; 2020 and 2021 were the city’s biggest years over the past decade for single-family home construction. (Multifamily home construction, however, faltered in 2020 before doubling the following year.)
The metro area also added close to 99 million square feet of new industrial space from the start of 2012 to the end of 2021, sustained by large corporations like Amazon, Lowe’s and Kellogg’s and their need for warehouse space. Additionally, Atlanta saw the construction of 20 million square feet of office space and almost 16 million square feet of retail space over the last decade.
Commenting on the findings in the study, Jacob Sagi, a real estate scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that anticipation of demand is driving development. “This is highly correlated with job growth and demographic shifts. In the last few years, we’ve seen both favoring the Sunbelt,” he said. “This is thought to be largely driven by a lower cost of living, lower taxes, lower regulatory constraints on development and the increasing high-skill labor pool in certain Sunbelt [metropolitan areas].”
The full list, as determined by StorageCafe, is as follows:
1. Dallas
2. Houston
3. New York City
4. Phoenix
5. Atlanta
6. Los Angeles
7. Washington, D.C.
8. Chicago
9. Miami
10. Denver
11. Austin
12. Seattle
13. Charlotte