It was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and Laura Landers was Googling “good places to live” from her desk in Los Angeles. As she scrolled, she could hear her neighbors arguing through the “paper thin” apartment wall, a sound that had become grating during all the extra time at home. Her mental health had been steadily declining, and she knew it was time to make a big change. 

That’s when Landers stumbled across Tulsa Remote, a relocation program that offered potential transplants $10,000 to move to the Oklahoma city. She had never been to Tulsa, didn’t know anyone who lived there and mostly thought of the town as a retirement community. But she applied, figuring that at the very least, she could realize her dream of buying a home.

Meanwhile, she and her husband visited Salt Lake City but felt like the town lacked culture and diversity. They are originally from Dallas but had no desire to move back.

Then, Landers’ application was approved, and the couple decided to fly to Tulsa before accepting. While there, Landers struck up a conversation with a woman at a coffee shop. She described Tulsa as “a small Austin.” 

“We try and keep things weird, funky and creative, and you’ll see that when you’re here,” the woman told her. That sold her. 

They moved in December 2021 and bought a home almost immediately. In North Hollywood, the couple had rented a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment for $1,900 per month. They looked at about 10 houses in Tulsa before settling on an 1,800-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home with a big backyard. It cost $171,000. “I feel like an adult,” Landers said, with a laugh. 

“I wanted to invest in my financial future, and I feel like I couldn't do that in LA,” she continued. 

Landers kept her remote job in the move (having remote work is a requirement of the program) but found she finally had the confidence to launch a clothing line once she relocated. It was something she had dreamed about since childhood but never felt bold enough to do in LA, even as a professional fashion stylist. Then, her musician husband got a touring gig and began traveling 20 days a month, leaving her feeling alone — and with time to fill. That led her to her next venture, a nonprofit called Side Stage Tour, which supports the mental health of touring musicians and their partners. 

Landers said she loved California, but in Tulsa, you can find “the quality of life you didn’t know you needed.” She loves the lack of traffic. She even loves the different seasons. But most importantly, she said she’s felt embraced by the creative, entrepreneurial community that has been a driving force behind her ventures: “It keeps you wanting to better yourself. It’s a big city with a small-town feel.”

A new way of attracting Californians 

Tulsa Remote has attracted more than 3,600 members since its launch in 2018, with around 15% of those transplants coming from California. It’s the second-most popular feeder state for the program, second only to Texas; 90% of the members who left California came from a major metropolitan area like Los Angeles, San Francisco or San Diego.  

The program is selective. It’s had more than 60,000 applications since its inception, including almost 8,000 from California. Applicants must have a full-time remote job, complete a 30-minute interview, and go through a background check and income verification process. But, more importantly, the program is looking for people who are likely to stick around for more than just a year, Justin Harlan, Tulsa Remote managing director, told SFGATE. 

The program is particularly interested in those who want to have an impact on their community and have a career that can diversify the city’s talent pool, like software engineering or data science. “We’re not looking for folks that are going to sit on their couch and stay inside. We’re looking for those folks that are ready to be active and engaged in the Tulsa community,” Harlan said. 

More than seven years since its inception, about 90% of people in the program have stayed longer than the one-year commitment, and 75% have remained in the city since 2019. The average age of accepted applicants is 35, with an equal split between men and women, and the average salary is $100,000. Forty percent work in tech. The program has no plans of stopping, thanks to generous funding from the George Kaiser Family Foundation and a state bill called the Oklahoma Remote Quality Jobs Incentive Act.

“Oftentimes it’s the $10,000 that gets people’s attention, but I think the reality is that community is worth far more than $10,000,” Harlan said. “In the age of remote work, especially, people have really lost their connection to the world around them.”

The program is boosting Tulsa’s economy in a big way. For every $1 spent attracting remote workers, Tulsa Remote returns more than $4 to Tulsans through local spending, job creation and increased tax revenue, according to a recent report from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. For every 100 new residents, about 60 local jobs are created. The success upends the old idea that a city has to recruit businesses to set up shop using tax incentives. Instead, this program directly attracts workers, creating jobs at a sixth of the cost.

COVID certainly helped the program flourish, but Harlan said it’s also working because of huge improvements to Tulsa itself. Gathering Place, a 66.5-acre park along the Arkansas River, opened in 2018 to much fanfare. It’s since earned multiple accolades, including a feature in Time magazine's World’s 100 Greatest Places of 2019. Two arts museums have also opened since 2013 — the Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center — and the city earned its first James Beard Award this summer. 

Midsize cities are booming

From 2020 to the third quarter of 2023, Oklahoma experienced a net gain of approximately 12,700 individuals from California, according to data analyzed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the largest population of any state. Especially since the pandemic, midsize cities like Tulsa are thriving. They’ve outpaced big cities in terms of domestic in-migration, according to data from the Milken Institute. 

The reverse “Grapes of Wrath” phenomenon is largely driven by housing affordability. The median home price in Tulsa was $224,333 in May 2025, according to Zillow. That’s less than one-fifth of the median home price of $1.4 million in San Francisco. Even a more affordable California city like Riverside has a median home price of $652,667, more than double Tulsa’s median. According to Apartments.com’s cost of living calculator, the cost of living in Tulsa is 43.8% lower than in San Francisco. 

The majority of home buyers whom local real estate agent Sabrina Shaw shows around Tulsa these days are relocating from out of state. Three years ago, she started her own YouTube channel focused on what it’s like to live in Tulsa, aimed at luring potential transplants. She said she uses it to help overcome misconceptions about the city. “When they think of Tulsa, they think tractors and tumbleweeds, but it’s not like that at all,” Shaw said. 

Shaw describes downtown Tulsa as a “mini LA” in a video about relocating from California that has garnered more than 5,000 views, but she admits that the nightlife might not be what people are used to. She estimates she’s helped at least 15 buyers from California relocate in the past three years, and the state has been sending her more clients than any other. 

She said all her clients are tempted by the lower cost of living, but the majority are also interested in moving to a more politically conservative state. Some have connections to Oklahoma, but just as many have stumbled across it simply as an attractive place to live. 

Randon Young, then 35 years old and living in Long Beach, said he was at a point in his career where he was “looking to strike a bit more balance, as opposed to the hustle of LA where it's 24/7.” The tech recruiter visited Dallas, Charlotte, Atlanta and Houston, spending weeks at a time, considering whether each city could fulfill not only his dream of “a front yard and a backyard” but, more importantly, his desire to “be more of an asset to a city.” None of them felt like a fit. 

Young had never been to Oklahoma, but he was doing a lot of volunteer work with the National Black MBA Association in Los Angeles, and it often presented on Black business history. He loved learning about Tulsa’s historic Black Wall Street and started to pay more attention to the city, discovering that it also had a flourishing tech and arts community. 

He found Tulsa Remote while browsing LinkedIn. The $10,000 is nice, Young admits, but he said it’s not that much money if you’re used to the California cost of living. More important to him was the access to the Tulsa community the program provides, especially the ability to attend multiple events every week. 

Young decided to rent a house as a way to try out the style of home he’d like to buy someday. In California, he was paying $3,000 for a one-bedroom apartment in Long Beach. Now, he’s paying $1,500 for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house. He said he’s had to get used to deicing the driveway in the winter and making sure the pipes don’t freeze, but those skills didn’t take long to learn. 

He’s been impressed with the coffee shops in town, as well as the restaurant scene. As the city gets more transplants from places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, it’s only going to help the city’s already “adventurous spirit,” he said. The biggest adjustment he’s had to make is not having everything he needs available at any time: Late-night delivery is limited, and many retail stores are closed on Sundays and holidays. 

For Joe Garcia, who grew up in the Bay Area, it was Mexican food that he missed most when he relocated to Tulsa. Luckily, he found a local food truck, not surprisingly named Taqueria California, that makes a Mission burrito the way he likes. Before the move, he’d spent his whole life in California, attending Cal Poly for college and then returning to the Bay Area after graduation. In 2021, he accepted a new, fully remote job and took it as an opportunity to explore more of the country. 

Garcia considered moving to Nashville, Pittsburgh or Dallas, but he had learned about incentivized relocation programs and figured that would be a good way to try out a different city. He’d get social connections and a little cash, and if he didn’t love it, he could always come back to California. 

He moved to Tulsa in November 2022, despite never having visited. He rented an apartment downtown, figuring it would give him the best access to events. Since then, his social circle has grown, and in January, he bought a 1,400-square-foot house on an 8,000-square-foot lot for $425,000. He said he would have preferred a home with less lawn maintenance, but it was hard to find. 

And he can envision a new life in his new home, he said. Growing up in the Bay Area, he always heard a saying, “there’s a house, kids and retirement. Choose two of those three things,” because that’s all you could afford to have in California. Now that he’s relocated to Tulsa, he said it’s possible to have it all.