Remote workers are taking $10,000 incentives to move to Tulsa—and helping to solve its brain drain
Tulsa, Okla., has historically been known as the “oil capital of the world,” but professionals like engineers and tech developers—or “knowledge workers”—are now scrambling to make the city their home. The migration bump of about 3,000 from 2020 to 2023 is in part thanks to Tulsa Remote, a program offering a $10,000 incentive to remote workers willing to settle down in the heartland city. While program participants may count themselves a little richer, Tulsa has emerged as the big winner.
Research shared publicly for the first time this month from Harvard Business School management professor Prithwiraj Choudhury, who has gathered data from Tulsa Remote since 2019, shows evidence that not only are participants saving money through the program, but they’re also contributing to the economic wellbeing of the greater community. This is helping to reduce the city’s brain drain.
Choudhury and colleagues surveyed 1,243 people including more than 400 Tulsa Remote participants and about 800 applicants who did not end up in the program, and found that Tulsa Remote participants saved an average of $25,000 on yearly housing costs, compared to workers who didn’t move. Tulsa’s median home price is about $239,000 compared to the national median of $428,000, according to Redfin, and median rent is $1,395 compared to the national median of $2,080, according to Zillow.
Meanwhile, the city brought in $14.9 million in annual tax income revenue and $5.8 million in sales taxes from the migrant knowledge workers between 2018 and 2021. Beyond the numbers, the Tulsa Remote participants ended up volunteering with local organizations more than non-participants who lived elsewhere.
In another study, researchers paired a Tulsa local with either a remote-work migrant or another local and asked pairs to write up a business plan. Choudhury found the pairs of migrants and locals crafted plans with more prosocial, community-serving ideas. About a quarter of the 125 proposed business plans are in stages to seek incorporation and funding. One venture from the research, a local sober bar, is already open to the public, Choudhury said.
“Migrants such as these remote workers add distinct value to communities like Tulsa,” Choudhury told Fortune. “They’re not just perfect substitutes for locals; they are different, and when a local and a migrant work together, they tend to write or come up with ideas that help a local community.”
The program was founded in 2018 with the goal of enticing knowledge workers to a budding metropolitan that could no longer be as reliant on the volatile gas and oil industries that represented a boom for Tulsa in the twentieth century, according to Tulsa Remote managing director Justin Harlan. The program, whose $10,000 incentives are funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, was a way to diversify the economy of a city with no major university in the area and few economic reasons to keep locals around.
Tulsa Remote’s first cohort in 2019 had just 70 participants, but by the time remote work ballooned thanks to the pandemic, the program grew exponentially. Now, Tulsa Remote welcomes 30 to 70 participants per month. And those participants, who make an average salary of $100,000, according to Harlan, are pouring money into the local economy.
“We know that for every dollar we’ve spent on the incentive, there’s been about a $13 return on that investment to the city,” Harlan told Fortune.
Brain gain
An intervention like Tulsa Remote has been powerful for Oklahoma, which from 2016 to 2018 had three consecutive years of negative migration rates and its slowest population growth since 1990, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. In 2023, the state had a 0.85% population growth, its biggest in a decade, according to the Federal Reserve Bank.
“It’s not just anybody [who is moving to Tulsa]. These are skilled workers, high earners.” Harlan said. “We’ve seen the median household income increase. We’ve seen a number of college-educated folks increase, and have had a positive migration in Tulsa for the length of the program.”
The city’s population boom isn’t just because of Tulsa Remote, Harlan said. The city has started to become a growing destination only in small part thanks to the program. Tulsa is affordable and has a growing arts and culture scene snowballing due to the money pouring in from new residents with six-figure jobs.
The low cost of living has offered appeal to workers like Jhonathan Vazquez, a health care startup cofounder who moved from Houston to Tulsa in 2021 as part of Tulsa Remote.
“Here in Tulsa, we rent a house with a backyard,” he told Business Insider. “We just open the door, and the dogs have a yard. My wife got pregnant two years into our Tulsa journey and had our beautiful daughter. We would have had to move outside the city if we were still in Houston. But in Tulsa, we can afford to stay.”
A temporary solution
But as Tulsa Remote attracts more people to the city each month, there is the concern for the housing supply meeting the demand, as well as the gentrification. Tulsa is home to the Greenwood District—dubbed Black Wall Street for its wealth of Black-owned businesses before a white mob destroyed it in the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. This area has become increasingly threatened by downtown businesses creeping into the neighborhood.
Harlan is aware of the potential for gentrification and displacement. He said Tulsa Remote provides resources and education for participants to guide decision making, and partner Realtors and lenders complete an equitable housing program. Tulsa Remote also continues to modulate its cohort size to adjust to the housing available.
“We certainly are contributing to the growth that’s happening here,” Harlan said. “But that’s also just the nature of Tulsa becoming a place that people want to be, and I think as a city, we need to prepare for that.
Gentrification from Tulsa Remote won’t be an issue yet, according to Choudhury. Just 500 Tulsa Remote participants have purchased a home in the area since its inception, Harlan said. In the same five-year time frame, more than 20,000 total homes have been sold in the city.
Harlan said he is always toeing the line of how fast to grow. Tulsa Remote is piloting a program for digital nomads, offering a one-month stay in a fully furnished apartment and access to a co-working space, as well as noodling programs for boomerangs, former Tulsa residents looking to move back to the city. At the same time, Harlan said he doesn’t want Tulsa Remote to be around forever. The ultimate goal isn’t for the program to continue and grow into perpetuity; it’s for it to cease to exist.
“Don’t get me wrong, we don’t want to pay people to move here forever,” Harlan said. “At some point, I think our hope is that the magic of this place is incentive enough for folks to change their lives and move across the country.”
