The Tulsa Remote Worker Experiment
citylab.com
citylab.com
Honestly, I think that a lot of folks who feel stressed and cramped in metro areas like SF, Seattle, NYC, etc. might really enjoy living in a small town.
But a lot of states in the Midwest still present serious cultural barriers to many such people. Racism and bigotry against LGBT folks is less common than it once was, but it's still prevalent. Communities are usually less secular, with religion playing a huge part in peoples' social lives; sometimes it's almost a prerequisite to "joining the community". Pot can get you serious jail time. Raising well-adjusted kids can be harder because of how insular suburban areas are. And so on.
It's not like that everywhere, and most people are kind and empathetic at heart, but definitely spend some time in an area before you consider taking a stipend to move there. Places like Central Washington, upstate New York, and Eastern Colorado are hidden gems, but having spent a bit of time in Tulsa and speaking as someone with a slight countercultural bent, you would have to pay me a lot more than $10k to move there.
For example, the US has generally awful land use/transportation setups even in progressive major cities, and in smaller/less progressive ones, it goes from generally awful to extra terrible. Walking for transportation is unpleasant and near-useless, biking is uncomfortable and dangerous, and public transportation is sparse, slow, and unreliable. Housing options are usually either a single-family home in a super low density area that exacerbates the above, or an apartment in a very ugly large complex in a neighborhood with terrible schools. Obviously generalizing here, but that's what you see most of the time.
To demonstrate that I'm not using these superlatives for no reason: I can't find stats for Tulsa, but Oklahoma City's combined mode share for commuters who use walking, biking, or public transit is a massive 2.2 percent, and Tulsa's is probably similar. I find that people are pretty rational when it comes to day to day transportation choices; if that few people are doing something other than driving, there's a very good reason for it.
Right now I live in the outskirts of Munich in a backyard duplex (there's a 6-unit complex up front), a type of housing option that largely doesn't even exist in the states. Plenty of people around here drive, but there's also a few different grocery options within easy walking distance (and a ton within easy biking distance), public transit is fairly dense and reliable (extremely dense and reliable by US standards), all three of those things feel safe even with kids. And Munich isn't some weird outlier in Germany, the other cities I've visited have felt quite similar overall. I wish US cities could stop being such a dumpster fire when it comes to land use and transportation, but there's so much cultural momentum there.
[1] To explain what I mean by this, here in Germany it's very common to have smaller, say 8-12 unit apartment complexes that are not surrounded by a small sea of asphalt for parking; the parking is completely underground, so up front you have just maybe a small strip of greenery. And then they actually have a good-sized shared backyard, and the building itself doesn't look like it's trying its best to ape Soviet-era brutalist apartment blocks.
All will seem pretty standard, you go to a bar on a street with four other similar bars, then you realize that these four bars are the only places with people in them in the entire downtown area. You leave the bars and walk a block and you can hear your footsteps and thoughts echo off of the empty blocks. You might be lucky to see another soul on foot. There is just a lack of life in a lot of American urban cores, and that's not a feeling but a fact backed with population data. Cleveland in the 1950s had nearly 900k people living in the city. Today it's a bit over 350k people living in the city, a large portion of it is literally hollow (or demolished and converted to surface parking lots) due to large swaths of the population moving to new suburban developments in the 1950s, and a lack of immigration back into the urban core. The overall metro population of Cleveland has been pretty stable, if declining, but the city itself only appears as a city from 9am to 5pm, and during the odd sports game, as a result. Restaurants and stores might only be open for weekday lunch because there isn't foot traffic otherwise.
This isn't true in every city, however. For instance, Los Angeles experienced a similar white flight effect with the development of their surburban neighborhoods, however in the wake of this population shift, immigration continued to occur and the population continued to rise at double digit rates every decade. Now, the former neighborhood of the Los Angeles elite of the 1920s, Westlake, is a thriving community of central american immigrants and the densest part of the entire city. The same cannot be said about the Cleveland analog, millionaires row on Euclid Ave, which used to count Rockefeller and Carnegie among their storied residents.
See also: the hastily made Cleveland tourism video (parody): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY
I live in a college town in Michigan and work for a company in San Francisco.
I don't find biking to be uncomfortable here whatsoever. In fact there are maybe a half dozen to a dozen coffee shops I can work from that are around two miles away from my house and I bike to them all the time- even in the winter if the roads aren't icy.
Or if you want something more concrete to work with: how many mile lanes of protected bike lanes or off-street bike paths are there in your town? How does that compare to the number of mile lanes for sidewalks or general vehicle lanes? What percentage of controlled intersections use a protected design? How wide are the roads? What's the speed limit, and how fast do people actually drive? How common are pedestrian islands? How sharp are the curb corners? How many of the painted bike lanes in the door zone? How common are walk/bike cut-throughs? What percentage of intersection lights have a marker for bikes?
Most cyclists who talk about how comfortable they are in the US don't realize just how bad it is there. Yes, you can still often get by; I certainly managed, in the bay area, and Seattle, and Utah, and even Alabama. But it was still total garbage compared to the places that take biking seriously (which is exactly why so few people do it in the states).
We live in an area that is, by most Americans' standards, fairly dense, and yet we started having our son bike to school a mile away, by himself, when he was 7, and he started biking alongside us to a kindergarten 2 miles away when he was 5. He's 8 now, and he sometimes bikes himself to a friend's house, or a park, or a grocery store or bakery for an errand. That kind of thing is almost unheard of in the US these days.
So, for instance: lack of walkability or public transportation is problematic for a lot of us, but it's obviously not a showstopper for everyone; lots of remote-working knowledge workers in Southern California are already in the suburbs and already use cars to get everywhere.
The people talking about public transportation are still fine with cars for a large portion of trips. Tons of people still drive in Munich, or Barcelona, or Tokyo.
It's the "pro-car" crowd in the US that's unsatisfied unless public transit is completely crippled. Cars are so dominant and transit so hobbled in US cities that public transit rarely even breaks 5% mode share, but still many motorists insist that wanting to improve choices is "fetishism" or a "war on cars".
In big cities on the other hand many people don't have cars and you find people who both use public transportation and passionately advocate for it. They are "pro-public transit" in a political sense and have a deep seated dislike for cars for various reasons whereas the car people really don't have an opinion about public transport.
"Pro car" people really do exist, and they are batshit crazy.
There's really two overlapping categories here. There are absolutely some people who proactively hate public transit, biking, walkability, etc. if it in any way takes away from cars.
Then there are people who are, as you say, not really ideological about it, they just use cars because that's the way to get around that works for them. But, once there's a proposal to, say, reduce street parking and add a protected bike lane, or a bus lane, or something like that, often these people are suddenly very pro-car and anti-multi-modal transportation indeed, because they feel that their current lifestyle is threatened.
I don't totally blame this sort of person for how they feel: all their life, all they've seen is that driving works and other things don't. Because in the cities in which they've lived, that's how things are, because that's how things have been designed to work. Public transit has been terrible where they've lived, so why would they want money to go to public transit improvements? But, they're still wrong, it's just an understandable sort of ignorance.
> They are "pro-public transit" in a political sense and have a deep seated dislike for cars for various reasons whereas the car people really don't have an opinion about public transport.
Well, there aren't very many who dislike cars outright in general. They don't like how much resources cars get in the middle of cities, because cars usually have gotten far too much land and money relative to their utility and externalities there.
If you look at countries like Germany or the Netherlands, plenty of people still drive, but they have a saner, more diverse set of viable transportation options. That's what "pro-transit" urbanists in the US usually want, rather than the driving monoculture that is so common in most US cities and towns.
Personally, I'd love to see car 'bans' in city core areas like what's being worked on in Oslo or Barcelona (or was it Madrid?). Or the city quadrant division in Groningen, that's clever. Does that mean I hate cars? Nah, I actually love road trips, there are some things that cars are super great for. But cars don't belong for most trips in city centers, they make things worse, and even the people who currently do have to drive downtown aren't exactly loving it, right?
US city centers really have the worst of both worlds. They're still designed for driving in a way that makes walking, biking, and public transit some combination of inefficient, unsafe, and unpleasant. But driving there isn't fun either; the very nature of being dense means that parking and traffic are both major pains. So no matter what you choose, it still sucks. In contrast, taking transit into the center of Munich and walking around is actually pretty nice! And this is true for many non-US cities around the world.
You never see what was underneath the highway before it was laid, what used to be where that parking lot is, where the metals came from that were used to produce your car, what oil field your gas came from that day, and how all of these pieces parts from around the world were moved to that spot in front of you in rural Oklahoma. It's all hidden from view by design, but that doesn't mean it isn't there, causing collective damage under the guise of a false idea of personal freedom.
It's not the only factor, obviously, but it's definitely one of them.
And in this case, it does seem like it's relevant to building up a tech scene. That's how preferences are starting to skew.
I only commented because I recently took a long driving tour of the US looking for places away from major cities and near national parks/forests to move to, and Eastern Oklahoma sticks out in my memory like a sore thumb.
But the things I consider to be important in a new home are different from the things that other people might value. If there were a stipend for remote work in a town like Provo or Buffalo or Santa Fe, I'd be all over it. I also found the Ozarks to be very accepting and laid-back, and that's practically next door to Tulsa. But my experience is anecdotal, and peoples' perspectives and priorities are all different.
I suspect that's why they feel no need to offer you a stipend to move there!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/02/03/tulsa-mass...
Should we skip California because Native Americans were killed in the 1880s?
By the way, Oklahoma was not even a belligerent in the American Civil War, because it did not exist until 1907. All of its institutional racism was simply imported.
Maybe if I was married I could imagine it for a short time. But as a single guy I don't think I'd find the dating pool I'm looking for in a place like Tulsa. And I sure as hell would not raise children in that kind of community.
I grew up in a nice suburb outside Buffalo in upstate New York and I had a pleasant childhood there, but it's a desert of ideas and a hard place to get exposure to smart people learning/doing things. Not impossible, but much harder. The bay area is on the other extreme end in terms of opportunity and being able to learn from people. I think you grow faster when you have more interaction with smart people, and in a place where there is a lot of growth there are a lot of opportunities for that.
Though there are risks to any ideological bubble (and SF tends to have cultural issues that can lean similarly extreme to a small town) - that seems generally contained. There's still a lot more opportunity to learn from people building things here, and growing up here it'd be easier to learn more, faster.
It's also nice not having to waste time on things like religious discussions, the bar of interesting is generally set higher because there's already pretty good consensus. When the base-line is more of a rational/scientific world view you can tackle more interesting problems (and conversation).
Housing is extremely cheap where I grew up, but it's not worth the trade-off. Another benefit of being in an intellectual and economic hub is that there's a feedback loop that continues to attract more people all the time. This also means your kids are more likely to stick around (everyone I was friends with that went on to do interesting things left Buffalo). Though if local communities continue to refuse to build housing this may become less true over time.
I get what you mean, but hoo boy, as a bay area native, this most certainly has not happened there. Almost everyone I knew growing up that doesn't work in tech themselves now has long since left (as well as a fair number who do work in tech, like me).
What you're saying is accurate, but if the area chooses to fight its own growth, like what the bay area has done, it makes it much harder for people to stick around.
There's still a lot of people moving here, but I think you're right - it's in spite of all of the bad housing policy trying to prevent it.
I also think you're right that it's selected out anyone who can't command a high salary.
> it's selected out anyone who can't command a high salary.
Yeah, see, these can't both be true at the same time.
What's happened is that the bay area is an attractive place to live and stick around...except that the insane housing costs mean that people can't really afford it unless they live the college student lifestyle indefinitely. So that one single issue effs up the whole thing.
"prevalent"? Like how? I think you are making up. Still exist? Definitely yes. Prevalent? No way. Unless you have a very different kind sense of "prevalent".
Actually people in small towns in general are much nicer than big cities and usually they don't care about your skin color or whatever. And they in general appreciate "a slight countercultural bent", unless you have a different sense of "slight".
There are people alive today who survived a white-against-black race riot that killed hundreds in Tulsa. There are people alive today who were imprisoned and threatened with sterilization for being gay. There are followers of Islam alive today who needed police protection after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building instantly became an anti-muslim witch hunt. Oklahoma is objectively one of the most backwards places in America. It might be better than it was, due largely to federal preemption of their theocratic laws, but it's still incrediby intolerant.
The thing about small towns is the people are generally really nice to you, but not so much when referring to a group that includes you. One data point: a man who loved talking to people regardless of color or persuasion. But, he'd talk about a group of them with much negativity. Blame it all on FOX News?
reference: Apple's integration with Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus
I recently read that a tourism survey here found that 20% of the visitors are in that classification, some four times the national average.
Great for a college student -- cheap housing and good local booze. Hanging out on the Ithaca Commons was great, and the gaming stores (like Magic Cards, D&D) were awesome.
If someone is an upstanding member of the community and fits in with cultural norms, they will usually get by fine regardless of skin color. Of course sometimes this is not the case, but it is no more so than in cities where people of different races often self segregate into distinct communities and there is often latent racial tension.
For those who have had bad experiences in small towns or communities, it's dangerous to generalize personal experiences to vast regions or large groups. That just perpetuates bias and prejudice.
Prevalent? Citation needed.
I think an underrated grievance of people living in big cities is that feeling that you are a completely insignificant part of a community and culture that are so much bigger than you. It's something smaller cities can offer that big cities can't, and it's also something that Tulsa Remote has done really well by connecting participants with people in the city that have influence. The people who are happiest and most likely to stay are definitely the ones taking advantage of this - like Obum from the first paragraph (an amazing human, by the way).
Things like lower cost of living, traffic, and cheap housing get talked about a lot as reasons to move out of NY/SF/LA/etc, but are kind of just byproducts of the fact that more people want to live in these places because they have a lot more to offer in other ways. But this idea that you can move to a smaller city with momentum and become a meaningful part of that community is super compelling for someone with that mindset.
I think (and hope) the rise of remote work will keep pushing motivated people to move to smaller cities, like Tulsa, and wind up giving everyone a lot more options for interesting places to live.
If this is a real trend, my second question then is whether it will have an effect on the current migration away from rural communities toward cities. There are many beautiful places around the world that I think people would prefer to live in if they could work remotely. (Environmentally speaking though, I'm not sure it would be great to have huge numbers of people moving to all of the most beautiful spots on earth).
Nailed it. People often move to rural areas because they love nature, but ironically this is actually a terrible thing for nature.
Not saying everyone has to live in skyscrapers, but denser urban living is definitely better for the environment, most of the time, due to both energy efficiency and reduced need for land.
Oh this is one of my pet peeves. It's usually the people who claim to love nature the most who will go live right in the middle of it, thereby destroying it. It's like saying 'I love animals so much! Bring me another steak!' I eat meat, I'm not making a pro-vegetarian argument here - just pointing out the hypocrisy. If you really love nature (and not 'living in nature', which is different), you buy the smallest apartment in the city that will fit you (and your family where applicable).
"Most of the time" is likely the key phrase in that statement. I would say it depend on where and how. Living "in nature" enables partial self sustainability, and far from all land is currently used efficiently. Low yield farm land is perfectly fine for raising a few chicken and supplementing other commonly food product with self grown items, and that reduces strain on high yield farm land.
As an example, here in Sweden the urbanization has been identified as a direct cause for lower biodiversity by land being overgrown with mono culture spruce forests. The previous small open plots and fields inside forests allowed for a more diverse environment for animals like birds and insects.
People moving to more rural areas would not top my list of terrible things for nature, or at least not around here. I do however agree that if everyone went to live in rural areas we would run out of unused low yield land, so there is definitely a balance to be made.
Sorry, I don't see how those things are connected. People moving from rural areas to urban ones caused forests to be dominated by a single species of tree? What?
Biodiversity depend on diversity in environment, and as I understand it, more so in colder climate zones. In the last 100 years the decrease in farm land, grazing areas, and gardens is the primary cause why about 1 300 species is marked as endangered here in Sweden.
When small plot of open land in the middle of spruce forest (European spruce) get overgrown here in Sweden, the result is first a stage of small and thick bushes until later the trees reclaim the once open area. Spruce is the dominating tree in the southern part of Sweden.
If you are asking why spruce is so dominating you would have to ask a botanist, but I would suspect the temperature, the soil and access to water as being the usual suspects for why one type of tree can dominate an area.
I should make it clear that what I describing is the situation in Sweden. Rain forests are unlikely to have the same need for diversity throigh multiple small biomes in the same area. The US is pretty large area so I can't really say if any of its area suffers similar to Sweden, but I would suspect that Canada do.
The above linked sources (and references research in those) also point that diversity in how farming is done is also a key part of the decrease biodiversity. High yield farming of the same plant year in and year out is directly harmful to diversity. To enable this kind of farming people adds pesticides and fertilizer, both which links to a decrease in bio diversity through multiple factors. The redirection of water to more concentrated areas also pile on the problems for biodiversity. The more uniform and concentrated the farming become, and the more spill over of pesticides and fertilizer, the more damage we do to nature. Those aspects is true not only for Sweden but globally.
I think you'd find the opposite to be true. People would live closer to their families while also tapping job markets that are only available far away.
Now that I live closer to family nobody needs to fly to visit each other. It has probably cut down on demand for over 6 cross country flights per year which I would think is very good for the planet.
You just have more options to live sustainably in the footprint of a large city than out in the countryside. For example, you can ride electrified mass transportation for your needs, or find everything you need in daily life on a bike ride or even a walk around the neighborhood, and take up less space on the surface of the earth by utilizing the vertical axis. Plus if everyone worked remote, your whole family can move to your building, as is the case of some of my neighbors in my apartment.
There's a strong local music and bar scene and good vintage shopping, and some great barbecue, kind of an Austin alternative.
I wouldn’t ask tourists what it’s like to live in NY, but I wouldn’t ask someone from Queens of its worth visiting.
In the modern age, a city with 200,000 people is considered not major, only medium sized, but if you think about it that's still a shit-ton of people! So of course there's still a lot of things to do around. Middle Ages London wasn't that big!
Would make me run away screaming.
I am not sure that there are that many cities with public schools that can boast such placement.
George Kaiser (the gazillionaire who started the foundation that pays for this program) is a very active Harvard alum in addition to being an impressive philanthropist.
The paradox of tolerance partially explains this (frequently invalid) bit of discrimination.
But if getting a leg up on selective admissions IS one of your goals, taking your bright teenager to live in a conservative rural or semi-rural area is actually a great way to avail yourself of the many regional quotas these colleges use.
But it’s also frequently a way to make your teenagers really hate you for moving them to such a place...
Was watching a news segment about startups in Cleveland a while back and one of the big things is the lack of investors, so people are forced to leave their family and community to go elsewhere if they want to be successful. Not from Cleveland but it sounds like a similar story in a bunch of places.
Then probably smart people feeling disconnected or lonely because of the lack of resources and startup/tech culture. The census I think is going to be a big blow for places like Ohio and other places, no wonder younger people are moving for better opportunities, and then when they are ready to start their own families, wonder if their kids and future kids will stick around? Sounds like then Cities are losing generations of people, so long term this is going to compound and hurt cities and states even more for their inaction. Plus I think weather plays a bit of a role too, not all just economics - but then again there's a lady I know from Texas who wants to move to Ohio because she likes the cold, while I rather like the warm so sounds like we rather just swap places haha...
Plus people are anti-tech. Some people like their quiet small towns, and affordable houses. Tech money flows and then the rents and house prices go up. and then people stereotype tech people too. So sorta like a not in my backyard thing too. Not everyone wants tech I guess, so maybe it's easier to just move elsewhere than trying to turn your own community into the vision you have. Then people don't trust tech, I used Apple Pay at like one of the only places that take it and the lady commented on it about not trusting it. Then I was listening to a podcast segment and I guess some college in Michigan installed Apple Pay to pay for things and found sales went up, I mentioned that I thought that was cool and someone said they wouldn't trust their credit card with a vending machine... When I think it's, in fact, more secure than an actual credit card, but then again even the basic idea of public-private key cryptography goes over people's heads.
I kinda feel like if I grew up and lived in a better area for tech, I'd probably be more successful personally, meetups and networking with other like-minded people I think would help. Plus I kinda feel like I have trust problems, people online I was going to work on projects with me but some people are so flakey or just disappears instead of staying committed. Like wanted to do something media related years ago, and the person just disappeared on me. Then was doing another project where someone was going to focus on sales, and agreed to give them a % of the company but can't seem to get ahold of him(But I know now that's what vesting is for). So seems like a recurring theme I always get flaky people. So I feel like real in person could be a benefit too in that regard. It seems more real too, and plus people try to read emotions and stuff in between the lines - but even then there are stories of people working offline and it not working out too... So I guess that's why it's important to get the right structure, and contracts and stuff in place. Focusing on the tech part for my own project first on my own but hoping to take Startup School and pick up on things before I involve others just because I don't want to get burned. But personally I think I rather just bootstrap and own 100%, and then pay contractors or employees when profitable to work on features I don't want to personally do, so less conflicts and not slowing down making decisions, could consult people for advice but I'd have the final say.
If Google or Amazon or whoever could get enough skilled people to move to random other cities, they would, because that would obviously save them a lot of money, both in salaries and office rent. The fact that, for the most part, they stubbornly stick to pricey tech hubs is itself quite telling.