Aug. 10, 2026, 1:03 p.m. ET
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Tulsa, Okla.
Angela Harris needed to start her life anew.
It was a daunting task to even consider, she knew. She was approaching 50, living once again in Houston, the city where she was born and raised. In the five years since her husband died, she had lost the sense of who she was, and needed to find it somewhere else.
“It was like an urgency,” says Ms. Harris, a senior compliance officer. “I said, ‘I can’t stay here. I have to go.’”
The pandemic ushered in a profound shift in where many Americans can work, and now, places across the U.S. are offering incentives for remote workers to relocate. It's a growing economic development strategy.
Work would not hold her back. She had a good job with a good salary, and worked remotely, so she had the freedom to live almost anywhere she wanted.
She was joining a distinctly 21st-century American migration. A century after Route 66 carried generations toward jobs, opportunity, and imagined futures farther down the road, remote work had reversed the old bargain for a small but durable class: They could take the job with them and choose the place where they hoped to begin again.
Among the dozens of American places with incentives inviting workers like Ms. Harris to settle was a city where, 100 years ago, a businessman helped christen Route 66 as “the Main Street of America.”
Tulsa, Oklahoma, once, was a place you might pass through. Justin Harlan spent years trying to give strangers a reason to stay. Born in Tulsa, raised outside Kansas City, he came back for college and never left. As a recruiter for Teach For America in Oklahoma, he would ask graduates to stay two years in a place most knew nothing about. But he noticed something.
“Tulsa was always at the top of the list in terms of teachers staying beyond two years,” he says. “The barrier was often just getting someone to give it a chance.”
Tulsa Remote, which Mr. Harlan has run since 2021, is that observation turned into organized effort. Founded in 2018 by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, in a city trying to loosen its dependence on oil and gas, it pays remote workers $10,000 to live in Tulsa for a year. The money does not buy a resident. It buys a trial. More than 4,200 people have taken it; about 80% are still there two years on.
They arrive with jobs in hand, which Mr. Harlan calls the fairness of it. “You’re not taking away from a local,” he says. Not everyone who applies is accepted, and the average salary of those who arrive is around $100,000. What it mostly selects for is people at a hinge: “Folks experiencing some sort of major life change. Ready to turn a page.”
More people can pursue this change today without looking for a new job – untethering geography from employment. Rebecca Hinds began a doctorate on remote work at Stanford in September 2019, when it was an odd thing to study. But within six months, the whole country was her laboratory.
Before the pandemic, remote workers were stigmatized, she says – passed over, presumed to be slacking. Then the offices emptied and everyone was on the same screen. “For the first time, many of these remote workers felt a sense of leveling,” she says.
Roughly 12% of full-time American employees work entirely from home – more than double what it was before the pandemic, but still far less than what many predicted five years ago. Hybrid work turned out to be the durable change, and about 25% split time between home and office.
