Stephen Pingry/Tulsa World via AP
People visiting the Adventure Playground during the opening of the Gathering Place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, September 2018
Kate Birtch was living in Singapore with her new husband and looking to settle down somewhere in the U.S. Friends and family got in touch with Birtch about Tulsa Remote, a privately funded campaign offering remote workers $10,000 to relocate to Tulsa for one year.
While living abroad, Birtch founded a company that develops insurance technology for startups. She had never considered Tulsa but decided to look into the program. Although Birtch, 38, says she did a lot of research beforehand, she applied without even bothering to tell her husband.
By the time Tulsa Remote decided to fly in Birtch and other prospective applicants for a tour of the city, her husband was fully on board. Now, near the end of her Tulsa Remote year, Birtch and her husband expect to complete renovations on a 1934 bungalow and move in soon.
Knowledge workers are landing good, internet-powered jobs that aren’t bound to a physical office—and Tulsa, like some smaller cities throughout the country, wants to carve out a niche for itself as a more comfortable and welcoming place to work. Since many of the highest-paying jobs in innovative industries tend to be concentrated in a few large cities where the cost of living has become more expensive, Tulsa wants to tap into the fresh ideas and vitality that new transplants can provide.
Tulsa Remote targets workers who want to move to a more affordable part of the country and greases the wheels with a cash infusion spread out over a year. There is a lot of interest: Over 10,000 people applied for just 100 spots in the first group. About 70 participants—115 people including partners and family members—actually picked up and moved in 2019. Launched in November 2018, Tulsa Remote is fully funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), established by George Kaiser, the 77-year-old scion of a local family oil empire.
Richard Florida, the founder of CityLab and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, compares Tulsa’s efforts to those in other small and midsize American cities like Pittsburgh, Nashville, and Indianapolis, and says he’s been impressed at their efforts to “reinvent themselves in an era of winner-take-all urbanism and superstar cities.”
A recent Brookings Institution report identified 13 “innovation sector” industries spending heavily on research and employing a high share of science, tech, engineering, or math workers in areas like aerospace and information services. These jobs are heavily concentrated in just a few metro areas like Seattle and Boston, but astronomical housing prices are pushing workers away from these areas. “I was writing in 2000 about the beginnings of a shift to what we now call superstar locations,” says Florida. “I think we’re beginning to see an inflection away from those places.”
Florida describes the efforts of Tulsa Remote as more sophisticated than simply trying to lure a single large employer like Amazon. Tulsa Remote is similar to Vermont’s Remote Worker Grant Program, but provides more resources for participants.
Florida, who has consulted for George Kaiser’s foundation and been to Tulsa multiple times, says that his “hunch is that this remote worker thing is a real thing,” pointing to a recent report in which some smaller communities, like Holmes County, Ohio, grew impressively with remote workers.
The son of German immigrants who arrived in Oklahoma after fleeing the Nazis, Kaiser has been growing the Kaiser-Francis Oil Company, the family business, since he took it over in the late 1960s. Worth nearly $10 billion, Kaiser is one of the few billionaires to sign Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge—and actually acts like he means to follow through, spending hundreds of millions to better the lives of residents in his native Tulsa over the last two decades. Kaiser has put more than $4 billion into the GKFF, focusing mainly on early-childhood education, teachers, schools, colleges, doctors, clinics, and criminal justice reform.
But there are ways in which Kaiser resembles some of his stereotypical billionaire brethren. Researchers at the Center for Public Integrity examined some of Kaiser’s business practices nearly two decades ago: His oil company acquired another oil company with $151 million worth of losses and was able to deduct them on its own taxes; Kaiser’s businesses were accused of underpaying oil landowners in multiple lawsuits; and he advocated for tort reform in Oklahoma that limited the kind of damages his company was forced to pay. Both The New York Times and Bloomberg have taken hard looks at the GKFF’s tax practices. There’s also Solyndra, the quickly bankrupt solar company that became a mini-scandal early in President Obama’s first term. The GKFF was the single-largest investor in the green-energy poster child, which ended up costing taxpayers over half a billion dollars.
Tulsa Remote may not have attracted many naysayers yet, but Vermont’s program, which launched last year, has faced fierce criticism.
Tulsa Remote may not have attracted many naysayers yet, but Vermont’s program, which launched last year, has faced fierce criticism. Unlike Tulsa Remote, Vermont’s pays remote workers $10,000 over the course of two years, not one, and the grant comes in the form of a tax credit, paid by Vermonters. The idea that tax money is being used to entice white-collar workers instead of fixing roads is a tough sell for some, especially because there is little evidence supporting the strategy. According to Seven Days, a Vermont independent weekly newspaper, state Auditor Doug Hoffer says, “Attraction and retention are notoriously difficult to prove.”
Meanwhile, for Anna Sanger, a 32-year-old law student who grew up in Tulsa, the city has changed quite a bit in the last 10 to 15 years. “These days there’s a lot going on,” she says. “There’s a lot of breweries and coffee shops and events that happen all the time, like a First Friday art walk every month. It’s very different from when I was a kid.”
Not only does Tulsa have big-city attributes like upscale supermarkets and protected bike lanes, it also has some uniquely appealing qualities, like its art deco architecture and the Gathering Place, a new, massive riverfront park that earned Tulsa a spot as one of Metropolis magazine’s “Design Cities” of 2019. “It’s active enough to keep someone from one of the coasts stimulated and engaged,” Sanger says.
The entertainment industry has discovered the city, too. HBO’s Watchmen is set in a fictional Tulsa. Based on the classic graphic novel, the show draws on a central event in Tulsa’s history, the 1921 race massacre in the African American neighborhood of Greenwood. Known as the “Black Wall Street,” a white mob burned down the entire area and killed at least 39 people—possibly as many as 300 by some estimates. The movie adaptation of David Grann’s best-selling 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, chronicles the oil wealth stolen from American Indians. The movie, directed by Martin Scorsese and set to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro, will be shot next door to Tulsa in Osage County.
Despite these attributes, Tulsa has a “tough hand to play” according to Florida. With a population of about 403,000, it’s one of the smallest major U.S. cities. It lacks a significant research university and easy access via direct flights. Two national trends have also hampered its recruitment efforts: Knowledge workers tend to prefer big cities with lots of urban amenities and plenty of like-minded people (partisan sorting is at its highest since the Civil War) and Americans’ mobility is at record lows.
The Tulsa metropolitan area has a low unemployment rate, 3.3 percent. However, the median household income of $44,577 is well below the national average; poverty, however, is higher. About one in five residents of the city of Tulsa lives in poverty. According to the Tulsa Regional Chamber, the region does have some jobs in innovative sectors, including aerospace, but over 11 percent of Tulsa’s gross regional product comes from the oil and gas industries.
Tulsa Remote does not ask applicants about their age, sex, race, or political affiliation, says the program’s executive director, Aaron Bolzle. Applicants range from recent college graduates to workers nearing retirement from high-cost states like New York, Massachusetts, and California. According to Bolzle, the only demographic information that the program collects about its participants is what has been volunteered by the participants themselves.
The city of Tulsa is 64 percent white, 16 percent Latino, 15 percent African American, and 4 percent Native American. According to the Oklahoma Policy Institute’s David Blatt, Tulsa’s levels of school and housing segregation are average for American cities. It is not immune to racial violence: In 2016, a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man, Terence Crutcher. The officer claimed Crutcher was reaching for a weapon, despite video evidence showing his hands above his head.
Home to the evangelical Oral Roberts University, the city is an undeniably conservative place. Like the rest of Oklahoma, Tulsa voted overwhelmingly for President Trump in 2016. No Democratic candidate for president has won a single county in the state since Al Gore did in 2000. Republicans control supermajorities in the Oklahoma Senate and House, all statewide elected offices, both U.S. Senate seats, and four of five House seats.
Bolzle says that Tulsa is becoming more open-minded: The city council voted unanimously to hold public police-reform hearings; marched as a group in the city’s Pride parade; and made a new commitment to finding the mass graves from the 1921 massacre.
Obum Ukabam, 40, moved with his wife to Tulsa from Riverside County, in Southern California. “Day to day, it was very hard,” Ukabam, a marketing manager, says of his quality of life in California. “Just trying to survive, keep up with rent, bills.” Ukabam, who is African American, was concerned about potential racism. Ukabam says he experienced racism, bias, and prejudice growing up in Missouri. “I had a little PTSD coming back to the Midwest, to be honest with you,” he says.
Ukabam has been surprised to find Tulsans welcoming and friendly. But he acknowledges that there is plenty of room for progress in areas like diversifying the executive leadership of Tulsa organizations. He’s spoken at a city council forum on inequality and the city’s residential segregation. Ukabam warned that Tulsa must take steps to heal racial divisions or it could “explode” like Ferguson did in 2014.
Adam Recvlohe, 32, a software developer from Florida, is quite familiar with Oklahoma’s violent relationships with Indian tribes. Recvlohe, a citizen of the Muscogee Creek tribe, works with native people through his nonprofit Natives in Tech. He is likely the only native participant in Tulsa Remote, an experience he describes as “overwhelming.” “I become the speaker for 566 tribes in the U.S.,” he says. “But we have other people of color in the cohort and that helps.”
In 2020, Tulsa Remote is aiming for 250 participants instead of 100—and demand appears to be at least as high as last year—the program received 3,300 applications in the first two weeks. “We receive about 50 to 100 applications a day,” says Bolzle.
How much of a difference Tulsa Remote can make in the city’s fortunes is unclear. Right now, a few hundred people won’t likely have a transformative effect—and the specter of gentrification always looms over the next “it” city.
How much of a difference Tulsa Remote can make in the city’s fortunes is unclear. Right now, a few hundred people won’t likely have a transformative effect—and the specter of gentrification always looms over the next “it” city. While new amenities like a riverfront park can benefit all residents, city leaders may want to study cities like Seattle and contemplate how they will respond if an influx of transplants leads to higher real-estate prices, displaces poor residents, and introduces new changes, like cashless businesses, that longtime residents aren’t ready for.
A program that claims it’s attracting diverse groups of newcomers is a victory of sorts for a city that is overwhelmingly white, Christian, Republican, and flush with oil industry money. Tulsa Remote has already succeeded in changing the image of Tulsa in the popular imagination. Shifting the narrative from a depressed and depressing oil town with no future to a place with hope, excitement, and innovative newcomers is no small accomplishment.
But who shapes that narrative? Vermont, in deciding to publicly fund its relocation grants, has opened up the program to public scrutiny and ridicule. Moreover, Vermont’s budget is subject to a public vote, and the legislators are regularly subject to elections. Tulsa Remote has a lot more money to work with and a lot more latitude in how it is used, but ultimately, those decisions do not belong to Tulsans. Tulsa Remote is the latest chapter in George Kaiser’s multi-decade project to reshape Tulsa into exactly the place he wants it to be. Kaiser is creating a creative class in Tulsa, but it’s his creative class. Many Tulsans are enjoying the results today, but the transition from regional hub to superstar city is strewn with hazards. City residents—and the lawmakers who represent them—will have to act decisively in the years ahead to preserve Tulsa as an affordable alternative to superstar cities and the inequities that those places have produced.
