“A place like Tulsa is big enough to have all the amenities that I wanted from a big city it just doesn’t have any duplicates,” Holk says. “If you want your ‘80s-themed video-game barcade, we’ve got one. We just don’t have three.”
Tulsa Remote, as Next City previously reported, is a program launched by the George Kaiser Family Foundation that offers money to young remote workers to entice them to make Tulsa home. In the year following its launch, the program got 10,000 applicants. Now, says Ben Stewart, the program’s executive director, more than 50,000 people have applied, and more than 600 have actually moved to Tulsa. Recently, the group made an upgrade to the incentive. While the $10,000 was previously split up into a handful of payments distributed over the course of a year, Tulsa Remote is now offering workers a $10,000 lump sum to make the move, advertising the money as a partial down payment on a house. The terms of the program still require people to l
Some cities and regions in the heartland want to bring energy and vitality to their towns by attracting dynamic workers. The programs are getting a lot of attention during the pandemic.