At least 65 Denverites have already left Colorado for the less expensive city in Oklahoma, ac
Tulsa, Oklahoma, is luring remote-working tech professionals away from Denver with perks including a yearlong $10,000 grant, free desk space in a communal office and a network of like-minded peers.
Tulsa Remote, founded in 2018, has lured over 1,600 remote workers to the second-largest city in Oklahoma. According to program organizers, 92 transplants have come from Colorado, with 65 of those from Denver specifically.
One of their taglines reads “Everyone thinks their city is special. Tulsans just know it.”
Some of the workers who left Colorado for Tulsa said the Covid-19 pandemic changed their minds about the state.
“During the pandemic, it's like OK, everything we love about Colorado, we're not able to do,” said Chantel Nguyen, an alum of Tulsa Remote. “I miss how pretty it is.”
Nguyen and her husband, Brandon Minor, lived in Colorado for six years prior to their pivot to Tulsa. While living in Boulder, they heard of Tulsa Remote from an acquaintance in San Francisco. Minor, a remote-work veteran who runs his own autonomous vehicle tech company, Tangram Robotics, was accepted into the program separately from his wife, giving them a $20,000 incentive to live in Tulsa for a year.
Program managers say 93% of Tulsa Remote workers stay beyond the one-year program, with Colorado movers making up 5.4% (or fourth most) of all program members. The average income of a Tulsa Remote program worker as of mid-2021 was slightly over $104,000.
These workers are realizing a very high quality of life is within reach of budgets, said Justin Harlan, Tulsa Remote’s managing director.
“[There's] definitely a much stronger sense of community and the ties to the city here,” Nguyen said.
In what started as a 100% philanthropic business model, Tulsa Remote now reaps the benefits of recent Oklahoma state legislation, House Bill 2860, that is incentivizing remote-working organizations based on their workers' performance, basically reimbursing employee tax dollars back to the organization.
Tulsa Remote estimates a $13.77 return in new labor income per dollar spent on the remote workers' incentive, with $62 million in 2021 income for Tulsa County coming from the organization’s remote workers.
Remote work remains popular among employees, particularly in tech, even as lower Covid-19 case numbers are prompting employers to invite workers back to the office. But some experts say the ability to work from anywhere is encouraging movement away from more-expensive metro areas.
One of the reasons Denver is experiencing an exodus of professional workers is due to the rising cost of living.
The west south-central area of the U.S., which includes Tulsa as defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, isn't getting cheaper, either. All urban consumers in the area saw a Consumer Price Index increase of 9.5%, with food specifically jumping 9.3% compared to Denver’s 9.1% in the year ending March 2022, according to the BLS.
But the price of living is lower. A study from Zumper found Tulsa’s median one-bedroom rent was $950 compared to Denver’s $1,760 in May. The median sale price for Tulsa homes was $225,000 compared to Denver’s $632,788 in April, Redfin found.
Nguyen's and Minor’s first incentivized year in Tulsa renting a three-bedroom house for $900 a month went so well that they decided to stay when the one-year program grants expired. They bought a 1,600-square-foot house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms for $214,000 in August 2021.
High costs are hardly chasing everyone away. In 2020, Colorado ranked No. 3 for high-tech employment concentration after being within the top four since 2000, according to the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation.
Colorado also seeks to support remote workers through certificate programs sponsored by the state's Colorado Remote Work Initiative. Denver was ranked the No. 6 best U.S. city for remote work by Business Insider.
“Colorado is perfectly fine for remote work,” Minor said. “I think the infrastructure is certainly there for Colorado.”
Tulsa isn’t the only city trying to attract Denver’s tech talent. Arkansas has its own advertising efforts planted in Denver through an initiative called "Finding NWA," which offers similar benefits and assistance to Tulsa's.
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