Pizza Is Just Dough And Cheese Anyway

Because between Joey the slice guy and a four-bedroom house under $300,000, it’s really no contest:

Atlanta sounded pretty good to Scott Merritt while he was squeezed into his parents’ home on Long Island with his wife and two children.

He took a new job in the Georgia capital and moved his family to a $275,000 house in the suburbs with four bedrooms, a two-car garage, and a yard with a swimming pool. It came at a cost to his New York sensibilities.

“I haven’t found a single slice of pizza I have been remotely satisfied with,” Mr. Merritt, 34, said. “I am not going to the corner pharmacy and being welcomed by name any longer. It was a culture shock.”

The Merritts are among throngs of New Yorkers relocating to Georgia for affordable housing, a lower cost of living, a thriving job market, and warmer winters. Displaced Northerners must adjust to Southern accents, a slower lifestyle, restaurants that close early, a ban on Sunday liquor sales, and a reverence for “Gone With the Wind.”

They’re hunkering down by sticking together. New Yorkers in Atlanta have their own group on MySpace.com, and crowd athletic venues when the Mets, Islanders, or Jets visit. One exile has a Web log called Voted Off the Island.

“We have this pocket of all relocated New Yorkers who hang out together,” Mr. Merritt said. “All damn Yankees.”

About 40,000 New Yorkers resettled in Atlanta between 2000 and 2005, double the number from any other state, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. An additional 14,000 came from New Jersey. Atlanta gained 1 million people in the past seven years, the most of any American metropolitan area. It added 177,549 jobs from 2003 to 2006.

“There is a huge migration from high-cost areas to lower-cost areas, and Atlanta is a big beneficiary,” a senior economist with Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., Mark Vitner, said.