Metropolis
Why So Many Cities Are Now Paying Workers $10,000 to Relocate
With the rise of remote work, cities like Tulsa and Tucson are offering big bucks to lure talent untethered by an office
Metropolis is a column about the intersection of technology, business, and cities.
It’s not Instagram, but it may as well be. Tucson, Arizona, flaunts its star-filled desert sunset landscapes, taunting you with the thought that this could be your backyard view. Northwest Arkansas sells itself with a thrilling picture of a mountain biker navigating an elevated trail: sparkling water on one side, lush forests on the other, and, one assumes, a bright, adventurous future ahead. Vermont’s photos — small towns, steeples, and all, framed by rolling green mountains — tug at one’s sense of nostalgia. These aren’t ads targeted at tourists. They’re marketing campaigns aimed at convincing young, hungry talent to take a gamble on a new place alongside a less romantic reason to explore a new city: cold, hard cash.
Call it the new $10,000 question: Would you move to northwest Arkansas? The area and an increasing number of cities and states — Vermont; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Savannah, Georgia — are providing five-figure incentives to lure talent. The $10,000 welcome gift wasn’t determined via a careful analysis or formula, according to Ben Stewart, executive director of Tulsa Remote, one of the first remote work incentive programs. It was simply enough to grab attention and defray the cost and risk of a move. In an economy increasingly untethered from the traditional office, it also may be the answer for an emerging Zoom commuter workforce.
This is the “revenge of the small city,” says Liz Pocock, who oversees Remote Tucson, the Arizona city’s nascent incentive program that launched in November. In an era when talent has finally been uncoupled from an office, the economic competition between cities isn’t just about marquee companies and their headquarters, she…
