When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, Cynthia Rollins had been working remotely as the COO of a software company, based out of San Francisco. With the lockdowns limiting her days to her relatively tiny apartment in the city, she started looking into potential places to move to when she came across Tulsa Remote, a program that has incentivized over 2,500 remote workers from around the country since 2018 with $10,000 of monetary assistance to move to the Oklahoman city.
Even though she didn't know anyone in Tulsa, she took a shot and applied. In November of 2020 she made the move.
Although the program's requirement for the grant is to stay in Tulsa for a year, 88% of participants end up staying for longer, Tulsa Remote reports.
"I've lived in New York City. I lived in the Bay, LA, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, and out of all the places I've lived in, and I want to bring those places up for a reason because they are all dope spots, I have to say my favorite place is Tulsa," says Tawny Ann De La Peña, an ex-journalist turned personal coach and a fellow Tulsa Remoter since 2021.
CNBC Make It spoke with three Californian remote workers on their experience moving from the golden state to Tulsa, and why they aren't looking back.
'I can build my business and take a break if I want to'
California has seen mass migration out of the state in recent years, particularly following the pandemic and the rise of virtual work, a phenomenon that observers have named the "California Exodus." Between April 2020 and July 2022, the number of people who moved out of California surpassed those who moved in by 700,000 people.
One of the first things that stood out to Rollins when she came to Tulsa was the ease of life.
"One of the unexpected consequences of moving here was that it freed up all of the part of my brain that was still spent on logistics," Rollins says. Parking worries are alleviated, she says, as it's relatively easy to find space and it's free all day on the weekends and every day after 5 p.m. Running errands and meeting up with friends is also much less of a worry, she says, because "you can get to everything in Tulsa in 20 minutes."
"It's much harder to feel isolated in Tulsa than it is in other big places where it's just difficult to get around," she says, comparing it to her life back in San Francisco. Tulsa has a population of 411,867 people, according to an estimate from the 2022 US Census.
Not having to worry about logistics decreased stress for De La Peña as well. She says she is grateful that Tulsa has given her "breathing room": "I don't have to kill myself working a full-time job while fighting traffic and also building a business," she says. "I can build my business and take a break if I want to."
Worrying less about everyday finances helped them focus on their work
Unsurprisingly, Tulsa is a cheaper city than its counterparts in California. The same goes statewide — California ranks 3rd place nationally in cost of living whereas Oklahoma ranks all the way down in 47th.
The high cost of living in California made work stressful for Rollins. "I hustled to make sure that I made a ton of money so that I could keep up with my bills in California," she says.
The average cost of living for one person in Tulsa is $1,663 in total, including rent. Due to her living expenses being cheaper in Tulsa, she says she has found "the freedom to do the kind of work that I really enjoy doing."
"I can even say no to clients and take the ones I want to work with, which is amazing," says Rollins, who now works as a consultant.
The lowered living costs also made another dream possible: house ownership. "I never ever thought I could be a property owner in California," Rollins said.
A fellow new homeowner is Laura Landers, an ex-social media strategist turned business owner, who bought a house in Tulsa for $171,000. She compares it to a house she had been eyeing back in Los Angeles, in a "not-so-good neighborhood" which cost $600,000 before the pandemic. She says she has since heard that the house still has not sold after 3 years and is currently going for $1.2 million.
Landers had been trying to actualize her dreams of opening her own clothing store to no avail in Los Angeles, and says she only found the financial capacity to do so a couple months after she and her husband moved to Tulsa.
"In [Los Angeles] you usually have to work like three different jobs just to make ends meet so that you can live out your dream but then you don't really have the energy or excitement to live out that dream year after year," Landers says. "Ironically, downtown LA has all the fashion resources you could possibly want, so that was kind of an eye opener: I'm in the city where I can make my clothing line happen, but I can't actually go make it happen."
The answer she found to her problem was to move to a more affordable city where she would have more disposable income to put toward building her business, which led her to Tulsa Remote and more than two years after her move she is finally in the process of launching her own online retail store.
The vibrant remote worker community
There are at least seven corporate co-working spaces in the city, a number that has grown from just one since 2020 and is continuing to grow, says Rollins. Both the city and Tulsa Remote specifically have been making investments to increase the quality of remote working from Tulsa, in an effort to infuse the city with more fresh talent, she says. A big portion of that has been going toward building a sense of community among remote workers, in an effort to combat loneliness, a notorious side effect of remote work.
De La Peña, who says that she has historically struggled with creating a friend circle due to traveling and working remotely, credits the regular events and activities hosted by Tulsa Remote as making the process much easier and quicker for her. "We are like expats in America," she says of the community.
Landers has also enjoyed finding a large creative and entrepreneurship driven community in Tulsa, which she says is similar to Los Angeles.
"People here are just hungry to make things happen and not just on a Tulsa scale but a much larger scale," she says. "[My husband and I are] just so happy to see that there is a community for us that would keep us creative and moving towards the careers we want to pursue."
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