Programs from Oklahoma to Vermont lure remote workers by showering them with perks, spending taxpayer dollars in hopes of boosting local economies. But do they work? Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/Insider
- Many places began offering perks like money and bikes to woo remote workers during the pandemic.
- There are more than 90 of these relocation programs across the country, up from 54 in 2021.
- While the programs can have benefits, economists debate whether the incentives are worth their cost.
By now you’ve likely heard of the big “Zoomtowns” like Denver and Phoenix that attracted scores of remote workers during the pandemic.
But smaller cities and towns throughout the country — from Tucson, Arizona, to Morgantown, West Virginia — are also trying to get in on the remote-work gold mine by offering incentives such as cash, access to local coworking spaces, mountain bikes, and even “grandparents on demand” for babysitting to attract remote workers.
In December 2021 there were 54 of these programs to woo digital nomads, but that number has since ballooned to over 90, according to MakeMyMove, a private consulting company that helps create and market the incentive programs.
The programs generally seek to accomplish three things: bring new people to town, increase local spending, and help spur employment and wage growth.
“A lot of these places have been historically losing their population because people needed to leave in order to find good jobs,” said Evan Hock, a cofounder of MakeMyMove. “Now people can bring their jobs wherever they want to go, and they’re voting with their feet.”
Economists and others, however, are split on whether these programs are worth their cost to taxpayers and local governments. Michael Hicks, an economist at Ball State University, told Insider that because these programs essentially pay people who were already planning to relocate, the money could be better spent on improving roads and schools directly.
Measuring their success is challenging. There’s no single metric to point to, and these programs are relatively new, making their impact hard to truly gauge.
Insider reviewed the offerings, pros, and cons of three programs, which have lured thousands of people to Tulsa, Oklahoma; Greensburg, Indiana; and Vermont. The programs have attracted considerable interest, but their benefits to the local communities are difficult to quantify.
On whether these programs are worth their cost, the jury, for now, is out.
Tulsa Remote
- The incentive:Up to $10,000 for relocation expenses, and a free mountain bike
- Launched in: 2019
- Number of applicants: Over 66,000
- Number of recipients: Over 2,000
- Cost of the program: A rep for Tulsa Remote declined to comment on how much it costs to run the program.
The program’s participants say: Jason Mathew, who founded the wellness app LeadMeNot, told Insider that the Tulsa Remote program gave him the opportunity to provide “true economic, cultural, social, and political change to a city,” which he found “incredibly compelling.”
“Living in places like San Francisco, Washington, DC, and even Austin made me feel like an average Joe with no true opportunity to go above and beyond,” Mathew said. “I wasn’t searching for Tulsa, but it was exactly what I was looking for.”
The program’s organizers say: Jessica Risenhoover, a spokesperson for Tulsa Remote, said the program is successful because it helped increase the number of highly skilled workers in the economy and brought more high-income earners to town. The assumption of the program, then, is that folks are spending their grant dollars and income at local businesses like restaurants and shops.
On the surface, the program seems to have accomplished its aim of luring people with high incomes to town. The more than 2,000 people who received Tulsa Remote grants have a median income of more than $85,000. The Tulsa metro area’s median income was just over $52,000 in 2021, according to census data.
Risenhoover said that in all, the more than 2,000 recipients brought a total of $61 million of salary income into the metro between 2019 and 2021, the last full year of data available.
The program’s detractors say: Daniel Newman, a policy expert at the nonprofit research organization Economic Innovation Group whose analysis of the Tulsa Remote program culminated in a 68-page report in 2021, said the early program data was promising but precise economic-impact figures needed “to be taken with a grain of salt” given the small sample size.
For starters, he found the income generated by recipients of the Tulsa Remote program was just a sliver of the $80 billion the 468,000-plus workers in the Tulsa metro area generated in 2021.
Risenhoover said that the Tulsa Remote program was not designed to be “the sole driver of economic growth for the city” and that it has had “an even higher impact today than the 2021 EIG report reflects” because more than 1,000 participants have moved to Tulsa since it was published.
“These programs are difficult to evaluate,” Newman said, adding that the model EIG is using to evaluate the program is “relatively new.”
Move to Greensburg, Indiana
- The incentive: Up to $7,000 to cover moving expenses, plus access to local coworking spaces and a “grandparents on demand” program
- Launched in: 2021
- Number of applicants: 3,050
- Number of recipients: 4
- Cost of the program: $70,000 in total
The program’s participants say: Doug and Kasey Waltz told Indiana Public Media in April that for them, the Greensburg relocation-incentive program was an investment worth making. The couple had planned on moving to town anyway, but the $5,000 stipend they received made the decision even easier.
The program’s organizers say: Evan Hock, the CEO of MakeMyMove, told Insider that the uneven distribution of remote work across the country is an important reason for states in the Rust Belt like Indiana to invest in relocation-incentive programs. Indiana has 24 incentive programs, the most of any state, according to MakeMyMove’s website.
Hock added that the incentive had helped increase local spending. The average income of Greensburg incentive recipients is about $92,500, and they are expected to generate an additional $370,000 in local spending over the next year.
Mayor Joshua Marsh said that the program has “generated more interest in our community over the last 18 months than we could have with any other program” and that Greensburg looked forward to continuing the program.
The program’s detractors say: Michael Hicks, the Ball State University economist who has been studying the impact of tax incentives for more than 20 years, said that evaluating the program based on new spending generated is a model that “wouldn’t pass high-school economics.”
Hicks added that Greensburg’s struggles to attract a meaningful number of people to town with its incentive were indicative of issues that other small towns are having with population growth — namely that they’re not investing enough in improving their quality of life.
He compared the impact of the incentive program to the opening of a Honda manufacturing plant in Greensburg in 2007. The plant was supposed to help spur local employment and population growth, just like the incentive program. But, Hicks said, many of the Honda employees chose to live in neighboring towns instead because they could find a higher quality of life. He sees something similar happening with the Greensburg incentive program.
Think Vermont
- The incentive: Up to $7,500 to reimburse moving expenses
- Launched in: 2018
- Number of applicants: The program does not track the number of applications it receives.
- Number of recipients: 435
- Cost of the program: $1.78 million, with an additional $3 million approved by state lawmakers
The program’s participants say: Matt Steckler, a music teacher and recording artist, told Insider that the Think Vermont program helped him and his wife afford to weatherize their home in Arlington, Vermont, after they moved to town.
“During the pandemic, we had a liquidity problem because both of us lost our jobs,” Steckler said. “When that grant came though, it just gave us a little more breathing room.”
The program’s organizers say: An audit of the program’s 2018 and 2019 cohorts found that the incentive had brought in more than $17 million in new economic activity and more than $1 million in tax revenue for the state over the first two years.
The audit, conducted by PFM Group Consulting for the state’s Department of Financial Regulation, found that it provided “a substantial return per tax dollar spent.” It estimated that the 2018 cohort generated 52 jobs, $2.5 million in wages, and $7.6 million in total economic impact, while the 2019 cohort created 63 jobs, $3.1 million in wages, and $9.5 million in total economic impact.
The program’s detractors say: Doug Hoffer, Vermont’s state auditor, has questioned whether the incentive is meeting its intended goals of increasing the state’s population and bringing in more college-educated workers.
In April 2022, Hoffer submitted written testimony to the Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development that Think Vermont was “fatally flawed and of no real value to policy makers.”
“This approach has been used a number of times since the pandemic began and I strongly recommend that you resist this,” Hoffer said. “That is, creating programs funded with millions of taxpayer dollars before the Agency has proposed goals and performance measures is terribly risky.”
A previous audit from Hoffer’s office in 2019 identified two major flaws in the Think Vermont program. First, Hoffer’s team was unable to decipher whether people moved to Vermont because of the program itself. According to a survey of incentive recipients, 74% moved to the state because of its access to nature, not necessarily for work opportunities.
Second, Hoffer noted that the program didn’t require people to move to Vermont before they received any benefits. To that end, 54% of incentive recipients said the relocation grant program is what attracted them to Vermont in the first place, the audit detailed.
“Job opportunities did not entice remote workers to make the move, which isn’t surprising because they already have jobs,” the audit reads.
The Vermont legislature added a new parameter in April 2022 to allow people who have not yet moved to Vermont to receive the funds before they move. The legislature also re-upped the program with more than $3 million in funding to continue.
But that didn’t assuage Hoffer’s concerns. Hoffer told Insider that the population growth illustrates that many of the people would have moved to Vermont regardless of the incentive, and that the program would be more impactful if it incentivized people to move to more economically distressed areas of the state.
“Grants to those who would have come anyway are a waste of taxpayer funds,” Hoffer told Insider.
Correction: February 21, 2022 — An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the Economic Innovation Group’s conclusions about the Tulsa Remote program. The group’s policy expert Daniel Newman said that economic-impact projections based on the program’s data, not the data itself, needed “to be taken with a grain of salt” because the projections were based on a small sample size.