Way back in the autumn of 2018, Tulsa, Oklahoma started trying to attract new residents by paying people $10,000 to move to the city.

A local billionaire was worried about Tulsa losing population and it was his money that was being spent.

Now at the time that might have seemed faintly ridiculous.

Ten grand to upstakes moved to a new city where you'd have to find a new house and a new community and convince your boss to let you work in Oklahoma.

And then came COVID. Americans had gone remote.

24 hundred people have moved to Tulsa through this program and today we are going to meet some.

I had laundry. That was huge. I had laundry.

The New Yorker who realized what she'd been missing.

A long time resident who watched rents go up as new people descended and the today explained producer who applied for Tulsa remote himself.

That's all ahead.

You're listening to today's explain.

It's today explained, I'm Noelle King. Vox correspondent Ronnie Mola has spent a lot of time since the pandemic covering this enormous shift in the way we work remotely.

Ronnie, you and my colleague, Hadi Mogdi recently went to Tulsa, Oklahoma to see what they're doing to recruit remote workers.

They are paying people and what else?

Well, first off, there's that 10,000 headline number, you know, which is a big deal.

And I think it gets a lot of media play because of it.

But what Hadi and I sort of learned from talking to so many people there was like, it's more than that.

Yeah, sure that $10,000 was great. Like as like a hook, as like the catcher attention.

But I was making pretty good money. So like, that wasn't the decisive kind of point for me.

Like for these people, they're making, you know, on average more than $100,000 a year.

While $10,000 is a big deal, it's not life or death, you know. It's sort of like, it helps sort of bump them over the edge.

I think the $10,000 was helpful to, in terms of the moving box.

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