Business leaders and local officials in Tulsa, Okla., puzzled for years over how to fill the hole created when young people left for big coastal cities. What, they wondered, could keep professionals rooted in the heartland?
They ended up turning that premise on its head: Rather than fighting to hold on to native Tulsans, they decided to recruit outsiders. In recent years, the rise of virtual work opened up a new way of responding to the city’s brain drain.
Five years after the George Kaiser Family Foundation began offering $10,000 to remote workers willing to move to Tulsa for at least a year, some 3,300 people have taken up the offer.
Steven Briggs, 55, was working remotely as a data scientist in Dallas when he applied for the program, Tulsa Remote. He and his wife moved to Tulsa in 2021, and he jokes that his new hometown embodies the flip side of the famous line about New York City: “What you can say about Tulsa is ‘If you can’t make it anywhere, you can make it here.’”
The sudden onset of remote work during the pandemic prompted plenty of cities and states — Topeka, Kan., and Savannah, Ga.; West Virginia and northwest Arkansas — to vie for new residents with programs offering cash incentives. Tulsa’s program is one of the largest. Researchers at Harvard and other universities examined the effects of Tulsa Remote, wondering whether it was proving a good deal for the remote workers and the city itself.
Their research, released this month, surveyed 1,248 people — including 411 who had participated in Tulsa Remote and others who were accepted but didn’t move or weren’t accepted but had applied to the program — and found that remote workers who moved to Tulsa saved an average of $25,000 more on annual housing costs than the group that was chosen but didn’t move. The relocations were also a boon for the State of Oklahoma and the City of Tulsa, bringing in some $14.9 million in annual income tax revenue and $5.8 million in sales taxes from the remote workers, the researchers estimated.
“Every heartland mayor should pay attention to this,” said Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and the lead author of the study. “Because of remote work, a large part of the work force is able to relocate, and there is the possibility of reversing brain drain.”
Figuring out how to keep professionals has long been a challenge for midsize, non-coastal cities. Tulsa was losing roughly 1,000 more college-educated people than it was absorbing each year from 2015 to 2019. During that period, people who moved to Oklahoma were nearly all over the age of 45 and mostly had incomes below the state average, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Local philanthropists pondered how to recruit new Tulsa residents. Around 2011, they began to notice that some people who had moved there because of Teach for America, which places recent college graduates into communities for two-year teaching stints, continued living in Tulsa. If other kinds of knowledge workers were given a reason to try out life in the city, they, too, might decide to stay.
“It was a lightbulb moment, that if we could incentivize folks to come here for a year, we could keep them around to contribute to the city and economy,” said Justin Harlan, managing director of Tulsa Remote, who previously worked at Teach for America.
The president of Tulsa’s regional chamber of commerce, Mike Neal, recalled being skeptical. “When they first mentioned the idea to me, I was like, ‘Have you lost your mind?’” Mr. Neal recalled. “‘There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell this thing is going to work.’”
But when remote work jumped to 43 percent of the country’s workers, in spring 2020, from just 4 percent, the prospect of drawing young professionals to Tulsa became far more viable. That year, 380 people moved to Tulsa for the program, and in 2021 the number climbed to 939. Last year, 643 remote workers moved through Tulsa Remote.
Oklahoma more broadly saw an influx of younger, working-age people and high earners during the pandemic, according to the Kansas City Fed. Since 2020, 40 percent of those moving to Oklahoma were between the ages of 25 and 44.
Program managers at Tulsa Remote sifted through applicants to select remote workers who seemed interested in contributing to the community by volunteering or starting businesses. Nearly three-quarters of participants who have completed the program are still living in Tulsa. The program brings them together for farm-to-table dinners, movie nights and local celebrity lectures to help build community, given that none have offices to commute to. (The George Kaiser Family Foundation has said it will continue to fund Tulsa Remote “so long as it demonstrates to be a community-enhancing opportunity.”)
Jasmine Renae Ball, 32, is part of Tulsa’s pandemic-era wave of remote-work migrants. She had been living in Los Angeles, doling out advice as a financial planner and dogged by the sense that she should take her own counsel and save up to buy a home. That didn’t feel feasible in Los Angeles.
In 2020, once her client meetings moved to Zoom, she applied to Tulsa Remote. She bought a three-bedroom home in Tulsa for roughly $185,000, one-third of the cost of smaller apartments she had been looking at in Los Angeles. Ms. Ball also persuaded her retired parents to move from Northern California to Tulsa, along with her younger sister.
“Everything was very expensive,” Ms. Ball said of her life in California. “It all added up to where you’d have to either pick and choose and not necessarily live the life you wanted, or people would go into debt trying to create the lifestyle they wanted.”
Plenty of cities across the country have experienced this cycle in recent years. Fed-up young professionals from expensive cities parachuted in and sent local costs soaring. In Spokane, Wash., home prices rose 60 percent between 2020 and 2022. Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore., have similarly seen housing costs jump because of an influx of residents. Tulsa isn’t immune to these challenges. The median price of a home in the Tulsa area has risen 9 percent since last year, while nationwide the median home price is up 3.2 percent.
Mr. Choudhury, at Harvard, noted that other cities across the country had seen a large jump in housing prices, and that the influx of residents through Tulsa Remote had so far been too small to significantly affect local costs.
“Gentrification is the concern,” Mr. Choudhury said. “But the scale right now is not concerning to me. In a city of one million people, there are 3,000 new knowledge workers.”
Some of Tulsa’s new residents have acknowledged that they don’t yet feel fully part of the culture — so how long they will stay remains unresolved.
“I’m definitely still Wisconsin at my core,” said Tricia Jimo, 45, whose move to Tulsa, through the program, was partly inspired by having pushed through too many frosty mornings shoveling snow out of her driveway before heading to work in the suburbs outside Madison.
“In my mind, I was coming to Tulsa for a year, and then I could always boomerang back if it wasn’t a fit for me,” she added. “Four years later, now the conversations I’m having are more like, ‘Are you staying in Tulsa forever?’ Maybe.”