About five years ago I received an invitation to check out a program being run by the state of Vermont to pay people $10,000 to move to the Green Mountain State. If you haven’t been there, Vermont is pretty awesome. But pre-pandemic it was a demographically stagnant place. State leaders wanted to try to generate some buzz around their state to get people to take a look and see how nice it was. While this made some sense, something about the idea of paying people to move to your state seemed off to me. Candidly, I thought it sounded a bit desperate.
But after watching several other states, cities and regions offer similar incentives, and find success with them, I had a change of heart on these programs. While they aren’t a full solution to demographic challenges, they do generate buzz, and bring in some new blood, too — at least if not too many other places are offering them at the same time.
Tulsa Remote, a program funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, is probably the one that’s best known. It offers $10,000 to people who work remotely to move to that city. More than 2,000 people have taken advantage of the offer. Being backed by a gigantic foundation certainly helped this one to do well — and generate publicity around the program in the national press.
Most of the other programs are much smaller, or just are getting started. But they all seem to show promise. One of them has been Ascend West Virginia. This one is also philanthropically funded, with a $25 million grant from former Intuit CEO Brad Smith.
Ascend WV offers $20,000 worth of incentives to people relocating to the state. This includes $12,000 in cash, a year of free recreational activities and outdoor gear rental, a free co-working space, and social programming to help newcomers connect to their new communities. The program is targeting five specific communities or regions: New River Gorge, Morgantown, Greenbrier Valley, the Eastern Panhandle and Greater Elkins. This allows Ascend WV to generate community readiness to welcome these new residents.
Demand was strong right from the start. More than 25,000 people applied to be part of the pilot program. Fewer than 1 percent have been accepted. The managers wanted to be very deliberate in how it was rolled out to ensure the highest likelihood of success both for those who relocated to the state and for the communities they moved to.
Candidates were required to have a full-time remote job, for example. They were asked to show characteristics that made them a likely candidate to stay in West Virginia for the long term, such as an interest in outdoor recreation. Around 145 people have relocated as part of Ascend WV so far. About 15-20 percent of them are returning West Virginia natives, but the majority are newcomers to the state.
Eastern Kentucky’s Appalachian region has also begun experimenting with remote work incentives, offering a $5,000 cash payment to people who relocate, with an additional $2,500 for anyone who moves with a spouse who works in education or health care. SOAR, the nonprofit running the program, hopes to see 25 initial relocations through this program.
Even though it has just started, it has already seen nine households sign up, with almost $1 million in total annual income among them. Colby Hall, executive director of SOAR, says that ultimately "the moving stipend has been a non-factor." It was the overall value proposition for living in his region, he says, that convinced people to make the move.
Maybe even more important than what did happen with these programs is what didn’t happen. These places didn’t get mocked by the coastal elites. Instead, the programs seem to have gotten a very positive perception. And they have generated a lot of earned media for the places that created them.
There surely has to be a limit on how many cities and states could create these programs before their ubiquity makes it impossible for them to stand out and get that branding buzz. But these places at least are making it work. Their success convinced me that my initial take was wrong.
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