“Hi, remote workers! We’ll pay you to work from Tulsa. You’re going to love it here.”
That’s what you’ll read on the ambitious landing page of the website for Tulsa Remote, a program that pays remote workers $10,000 to relocate to the Oklahoma city for one year. So far, it doesn’t appear to be false advertising.
Since the program’s launch in 2018, more than 2,000 people have moved to the city of 411,000 on the Arkansas River—and in 2022 alone, 20,000 applied. According to the Harvard Business Review, two new studies suggest that so far, everyone’s happy.
Remote worker participants in the auspicious program have reported a higher standard of living thanks to low housing and lifestyle costs as well as ample community engagement, even during lockdowns. The majority of Tulsa Remote workers came from California, followed by Texas, New York, and Colorado—all notoriously expensive cities.
Along with the $10,000, Tulsa Remote provides these workers with free desk space at a coworking space, rent specials, and exclusive perks and events. In fact, 90% of participants have stayed in the Sooner State longer than the allotted year.
In many ways, Tulsa Remote was ahead of the curve. Like Vermont’s Think Vermont program, it was established two years prior to remote work becoming the norm. “What’s unique about Tulsa Remote compared to other incentive programs is it started well before the pandemic, and we were looking at the prediction that more people would be able to work remotely, given the way tech jobs were developing,” spokesperson Caroline Glennon told publication Smart Cities Dive. “So once the pandemic hit, we did see a dramatic increase in applications, and they’ve been steadily increasing since.”
What makes Tulsa click
Perhaps what makes Tulsa’s program so successful isn’t a mystery. The median rent for all properties in Tulsa is $1,274—39% below the national median. The median home price is $210,000, well below the national median of $388,310.
Even after accounting for their new cost of living, Tulsa Remote participants have higher real incomes than they did before the move with no perceived loss in productivity, Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who studies remote work, found in a new study.
Participants also were more likely to report local community engagement, which Choudhury chalks up to their ability to “have more time to do almost everything,” because they spend less time commuting. “They are spending some of that time volunteering in the local community,” Choudhury told HBR. “It’s a win-win.”
The other half of the win: The people who already live in Tulsa. According to the think tank Economic Innovation Group, one new full-time job was created in Tulsa for every two Remoters who moved there. Plus, EIG wrote, every dollar invested in the program creates $13 in local economic activity. Daniel Newman, an EIG analyst, told HBR the program is a “highly cost-effective intervention.”
No one does it like Tulsa
About 70 cities are now offering similar programs, Fortune reported. But for J. T. Kelley, a Tulsa Remoter who moved from Austin in August, none of them hold a candle to Tulsa, which he called “just urban enough.” $20,000 is “not enough” for him to move to West Virginia, he told Fortune. “It’s not going to happen. You need $50,000 and a beautiful house.”
Similar cities eager to copy Tulsa’s model may find more obstacles than expected. Namely, HBR writes, the remote work capitals of the country—San Francisco and D.C., to name a few—are the same cities that experts considered “superstars” prior to lockdowns and remain in big competition with smaller spots. Even so, a program like Tulsa Remote is a better option for cities than offering tax cuts to corporations who would agree to move their headquarters.
“Yes, [Tulsa Remote] involves cutting checks to mostly well-educated, well-paid knowledge workers,” HBR writes, though it acknowledges that the racial make-up of program participants roughly matches that of Tulsa itself. “But it is likely less regressive than the all-too-common strategy of cutting taxes to lure corporations.”
Plus, participants are in no rush to return to their roots. “So far, we have only seen a few members have to leave Tulsa because of a call back to the office,” program managing director Justin Harlan told Fortune in August. “One member we have spoken to, an employee of IBM, has said if called back he would quit before leaving Tulsa.”
