I’m not sure you all on the coasts understand the incredible pettiness of midwesterners towards their neighbors and I flatly refuse to believe there is something nice in Tulsa
Damn skippy. The only nice architecture is in STL. Chicago manages to occasionally not be completely shitty. And fuck KC with Satan’s million-horned cock.
It is! People (FOX News, mostly) shit on Chicago, but it’s a world-class city without the rudeness of New York and the pretentiousness of Los Angeles. I will give New York respect for its pizza (although our tavern-style pizza is very good; it’s just a secret we don’t share with outsiders). And for most people, LA’s weather is superior. But I like having 4 distinct seasons and waterfront access, so Chicago is my sweet spot.
The Art Institute and Field Museum are awesome! Sue the T-rex for the win!
Anyone reading this, if you're visiting Chicago and have some spare time, I recommend you go up to Evanston and check out the Baha'i temple, it's beautiful! Great place for silent contemplation.
On some level the Fox types just don't understand how big cities are (y'know, barring the dishonest people working for them who live in said cities). Southside Chicago isn't Central Park across from the Congressional Hotel (if I'm remembering names wrong).
Another bad impact from the decline in remote work. In a world with a more mobile workforce stationary bandits have that much less power. Interesting counterfactual if remote work had remained dominant is local governments intensely competing to build desirable communities.
Not if you turned Tulsa into a miniature Coruscant, with 100+ vertically stacked residential levels connected by elevators and hover cars/airships, the rich elite near the top, the seedy underworld at the bottom, it would be rad! Tourists would come from all over to visit! Beware shady characters in cantinas offering to sell you death sticks.
Tulsa's current sprawl radius is about 30 km. At a billion people that's 350K people per sq km, compared to 28K for Manhattan. But if we double the radius it drops to 88K, which seems theoretically possible with current technology.
Finally a sane person. My slightly less intense take is that the Bay Area should look like the outer parts of Hong Kong: Super dense collections of sky scrapers, connected by public transport, with plenty land left for hiking. But we should build 50-500 sky scrapers and see what happens.
I would not for a few reasons. Fully remote doesn't work for most roles long term in terms of the health of the business. While some roles will remain remote the chances of getting a new one after a layoff are getting pretty slim.
Which brings up the next issue - I've seen in markets like Tulsa employees and employers fighting to a draw. Employees can't leave as there are no comparable roles within a commutable distance. Employers know there are also no potential candidates within a commutable distance either. So it ends up in a not healthy place employment wise.
That's stronger language than I'd use. More like "it's hard-to-impossible to create and maintain company culture when you're all in your separate living rooms, you're accumulating all sorts of technical debt, and the longer you let people think this is the new normal, the more they will believe you".
That’s fair. I work remote for big tech, I think something like 80% have RTO’d. It’s a funny equilibrium where all of my meetings have ~50% of people dialing in from different locations, whether that’s home, an office in a different city, or just a different building at the ”same” office. And because of this distribution, going into the office doesn’t feel like it adds much to the experience. Some teams are different though and I would bet they are more productive.
We went back to the office in my workplace but kept the same zillion Zoom meetings on everyone's schedule, so half the time my office mate and I both have Zoom meetings at the same time. Finding a room where you won't bug anyone else can be tricky!
I try to teams call from my desk instead of meetings every chance. It is like a 10+min effort to disconnect and re-setup my monitors, headset, etc. plus the Windows freak out when they jump between screens
I am at a big tech company that is still very remote friendly and I just happen to live ten minutes away from HQ. All my teammates are spread out around North America, so there’s no collaboration happening in the office. I go in 1-2x/week and treat it like a WeWork; get away from the pile of laundry and kids crap piled up and focus for a 1/2 day and partake of the snacks
Agree! As somebody who does niche IT consulting and basically becomes an expensive temp employee for 6-24 months at places all over the country - there are definitely smaller cities like Tulsa that have like 3 big companies that end up being the options for specialized professional roles. You're an internal auditor or database administrator - you basically can only work at those 3 companies. Wages end up being so much lower than nationally.
The healthcare analytics company I work for has been remote since 2014 and we're landing blowing up right now despite none of the executive team or the data science group living in the same city.
I have a buddy who works for FINRA and said that since they mandated people come back to work a couple times a week, they're losing a massive amount of talent (mostly analysts and IT) that got used to working remotely.
I'm extroverted and loved working in person, but (at least for programmers) it seems like it's remote or bust.
Yeh but every article I read says the job market is terrible. So it's at least plausible that he's not a reliable narrator?
I'll give you a funny example - keep in mind the average manger is average and half of them are even worse. Anyway at a customer someone who was fully remote quit and never told anybody - they just stopped doing any work. 9 months later they were found and their manager sent them a meeting invite to discuss they emailed back - "I quit."
We certainly had more than a few grumpy departures when we brought our last cohort back full-time in summer of '21. Call it one engineer or developer in twenty.
Interestingly, they were all of the people we could very most afford to lose.
IIRC J.P. Morgan found the vast majority of its top performers were already in the office so they figured what have we got to lose. And they were right - the worst performers were also the ones most likely to quit is asked to come in.
He (and many others) moved out of DC when they went full remote, then they asked them all to make 2+ hour commutes each way. His boss left and so did many of his best coworkers. He took a buyout after working there for 17 years.
I do know another guy who totally ghosted his company (may have been Wells Fargo?) when he was totally remote and his boss left for another gig. His co-workers didn't know what his assignment was or who he was reporting to and it took a few months for them to catch on. He's not there anymore (don't know if quit or fired).
Our company is still small enough ~200 employees) that we have daily scrums companywide and within our group. Everyone also has multiple weekly meetings with various clients. I can't imagine getting away with not showing up unannounced for even a week.
I’m tentatively in favor of basically making most support roles remote. Core operations, no. But payroll? Have a couple reps onsite and outsource the rest to some B2B SAAS grindset asshole.
Not payroll you want the people doing the work to fear being dragged to the parking lot for a good beating if the direct deposits don't go through. Seriously when people are remote they begin to thing it's all not real - that there aren't people at the other end of the ACH.
They’d *really* need to get rid of the job protections, though I guess they don’t have those post-DOGE? If you can’t easily be fired for not doing shit, you really don’t need to be doing remote work. (For the record I’m mostly against fully remote work, there should be an expectation that everyone’s in the office but flexibility when possible)
Most feds theoretically still have job protections, but yeah...kind of hard to tell what will happen a year from now. A lot of the schedule F stuff is still getting worked out, at which point Trump can fire rank and file people for whatever. If anything, assuming schedule F sticks, you'd imagine the feds needing to pay a wage premium to make up for the loss in stability, but that won't happen given the way the scale works. I think the most likely scenario for feds is 0% pay raises for the next 4 years.
I used to work for the feds in a field that recruits a lot of PhDs/MDs, and remote work was a major blessing. Many people with PhDs/MDs also have spouses with doctorates, so you pretty regularly encounter two-body problems when recruiting. It's really hard to get a health physicist to move their entire family across the country when you can only pay $100k, but it's a great deal if one spouse is already locked into a university and you can offer the other a remote position.
Setting aside the merits of in-person/telework, the current admin has been a complete nightmare, and it doesn't really seem analogous to private sector RTO. I have a friend who was assigned office space in a building without internet. They were remote to begin with, so none of their coworkers are even located in the same state. There doesn't really seem to be any point to it beyond trying to get people to quit.
Yeah, I have a friend that manages a team for a federal agency and she had mixed feelings about RTO. She was pretty sure it would get two people to quit, one of whom wasn’t doing any work (was working a second job and just phoning the Fed job in) while the other was highly productive (a military spouse that was no longer stationed in DC). She was happy to lose the first but not the second. It’s a mixed bag. I have no idea how that all shook out with DOGE though
At least where I worked, you could have easily fired the first guy for working an outside job without prior approval. Military spouses are theoretically supposed to be eligible for remote work, but I've heard none of the paperwork is getting approved.
I think what makes the DOGE stuff so very different from private sector restructurings is how completely disconnected it is from any sense of organizational improvement or why stuff is happening (...unless you think the destruction is the point). People are understandably always upset when organizational change happens, but most people would at least agree that their senior leadership team thinks they're acting in the best interest of the organization. I would love to see federal employee viewpoint survey results this year, but the Trump admin canceled them. Of the measurable metrics the federal government does have (call wait times, grant disbursements), everything is quite literally worse than it was 7 months ago.
It's hard to generalize about the federal government because it is so large and covers many different functions, but that's why it always made sense to let agencies at least have some discretion in their own staffing or work policies. Recruiting/pay/retention issues look very different at CDC/FDA compared to somewhere like IRS/SSA.
So what happens if you can't compete on pay, job stability, or quality of life? I guess you just get people who didn't have any other options. Fortunately, we don't expect federal employees to do anything really important like make sure commercial aviation or drugs offered for sale in the US are safe or anything like that, so no problem, I guess.
If that’s true, and the NIMBY cartels hold, there won’t be any point to education or white collar career paths after a while. The luckiest middle managers at our children’s equivalent of FAANG will be living in with their parents, and the transplants among them hot bunking in the Central Valley.
eh, I moved from Southern CA to South West Oregon. Town of 20k people, and I live about 30 mins away in an area with less than 1,000 people.
Yeah, there's not a lot of opportunity here, but I like my job and there's no way I could have a similar quality of life moving somewhere else because of the cost of housing.
Well, from where I moved I actually spent a bit more, but that's because we sold our track home, and bought a 20 acre ranch (with a house almost twice as big)
If we moved back to a bigger city, we would be back in a much smaller track house.
That's not a trade we want to do. Not to mention there's multiple lakes and rivers here within a short drive we can take the kids swimming or wake boarding in. And no GATORS!
Can you point me to articles, studies, etc. that show how "fully remote work doesn't work... in terms of the health of the business"? As a software engineer, I've been surprised by the push to go back to the office. I was previously with Walmart and my general assumption was that their push back to being in the office was really just a way to facilitate layoffs rather than actually wanting people in the office. But that assumption was based on nothing beyond knowing that I'm not personally any less productive at home.
What is your definition of productive? Writing the code that you've been told to write. That's the part thr AIs are getting good at. Knowing what the business or customer needs is the hard part and the part you can best asses by meeting with people in person.
If you're just writing code the business analyst has specd out - I'm not sure what kind of future that has anymore.
If my definition of productivity differs, then that only adds to my interest in understanding the assessments being made by corporate leadership. That's what I'm asking for -- something that helps clarify how these assessments are being made.
Given how widespread the push to go back to the office has been, I'm guessing there is validity to it. I just don't know what is in those assessments!
I would push back as there are a number of great companies that are fully remote (Zapier is the first large one that comes to mind but there are others). The issue with remote is that it requires a culture, tools, and processes that support remote success.
During the pandemic, a lot of companies and institutions went remote without changing anything. When they saw productivity slide, they chalked it up to remote not working and mandated return to office.
There are a number of advantages to remote work for institutions like better skill alignment and reduced office costs but you have to work at it to make it successful.
Zapier has 700 employees. It also seems to be in the software industry where its product integrates other software. For Exxon or Ford or Walmart or the Cleveland Clinic where you have surgeons and offshore oil platform workers and test tracks and such - it's not a remote friendly business.
It's like the new Boeing CEO pulling everyone back to the office next to the factory. What do you mean the new empennage flange capacitor isn't seating properly? Let's walk over and take a look.
Arguably, offshore workers have always been out of the office.
In all seriousness, I agree that there are plenty of jobs that require you to be in a facility (i.e. manufacturing) or in a designated customer service center (i.e. a casier) that can't be made remote. I would argue, though, that any job in an office where the sole equipment is a computer and work can be measured by output can in principal be done from anywhere.
The question about culture is whether Walmart can ask a warehouse worker to work in person while a marketer to work remotely. I think the answer is maybe, but you will probably have to try hard to make it work.
One thing I noticed coming back was mentoring. I've got a couple younger coworkers who kinda need some hand-holding, and when I was mostly remote, I just couldn't do the level of that that was needed. I think I'm less productive now in my formal work (writing text and code, mostly), but much more productive in my interactions with coworkers.
I grew up near Tulsa and still have lots of family and friends there. There are many things that I really love about the area, including cultural opportunities, a lot of the people, recreational opportunities, etc.
But there are also some significant reasons I would never move there or encourage people I cared about to move there.
1) Sate politics are so extremely right wing. I was a republican until 2016, and I’m still a relatively conservative independent, but Oklahoma politics make me ill. In particular what they are doing to education in Oklahoma is really disgusting. Also the impacts state politics have on healthcare available in the state are negative.
2) The religious climate. I’m a Christian and my faith is really important to me. Tulsa has the biggest concentration of terrible Christian hypocrites I have ever encountered. I mean, really all the stereotypes you hear about people going to church on Sunday and then abusing their families or cheating in their business. Where I live now in Massachusetts, nobody bothers to claim to be a Christian unless they actually care about it, but in Oklahoma it’s really culturally expected that you are and so a lot of people claim faith is something important to them, but don’t at all live it out.
3) Tornadoes. Tornadoes are unpredictable and scary and pretty common. My high school was destroyed by a tornado, the school that my mom taught at was destroyed by another, the church I attended, was destroyed by yet another, and my stepsister barely escaped being killed by another (she just got out of her car in time and when they found it later, it was on top of a three-story building nearby and completely crushed). I really love living in a place without natural disasters!
Back during the draft, ORU would take you without a high school diploma. They were drafting everyone with a pulse in my FIL’s small South Texas town right after high school, so he dropped out at 17 to go to ORU to avoid it. I think they got a pretty solid education there at the time, though.
Yeah. Both of my in laws are devout, but neither of them are conservative Christians or Pentecostals, more Methodist types. MIL was a social worker which doesn’t really lend itself to conservative politics - I mean they were Mondale and Dukakis voters lol and religiously watch Maddow. My family was much more conservative, my mom didn’t start voting for Democrats until Trump
I lived in Fort Worth for 15 years, one of my friends there was from OK and said about the same thing about politics and religion. Concerning item #3: my wife and I were driving through Duncan or Moore somewheres (we both remarked how beautiful OK was, seemed greener once we crossed the Red River TX state line). My wife said OK looked so much cleaner than TX...maybe, she said, its because people keep things picked up because they dont want things blowing around in tornadoes. I said, I think its the other way around, theres so many tornadoes they've clear everything out that wasnt bolted down 😂
I usually list Houston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia as the most underrated cities, but Pittsburgh probably fits too (except that in my world, U of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon are so prominent that Pittsburgh gets a lot more attention than Philadelphia, and I sort of thought that Uber buying the whole robotics department from CMU did this more broadly).
I live in Baltimore and am a Baltimore Evangelist! This place has everything you need, whet you are single, in a childless relationship, or have children! I absolutely love it! But it's probably not as cheap as Tulsa...
Detroit can mean a lot of things. It can mean the actual City of Detroit, which is certainly better now than when I moved there in the late 90s. But it still has plenty of issues, number one being the schools. Detroit can also mean Metro Detroit, which I moved to when the City of just wouldn’t cut it, and that’s basically just a variation of midwest suburbs. Detroit at a stretch could even include the People’s Republic of Ann Arbor, just 20 minutes or so away.
Seattle-area summers are basically paradise for outdoorsy types. 80-degree highs, low humidity, light out until 10PM, and all the mountains you can hike and/or bike trails that you can ride. Unfortunately that only lasts about 4-5 months of the year (although the skiing is also pretty great in winter in the Cascades).
Everyone's got their preferences, but I was always fine trading off some sunshine in exchange for just misty rain as opposed to brutally cold and humid weather.
Brutal cold is great *if* it snows. The worst type of winter is what you get in New Jersey: cold enough that you have to put on layers and all the trees are bare and the grass is dead, but not cold enough that is snows, so instead of a winter wonderland you end up both cold *and* wet.
Sometimes I enjoy a crisp snowless winter day. The air's refreshing and smells nice and the feeling of going into a warm house is very enjoyable, as is drinking a hot drink outside. But yes it has to be dry. Cold rain is no good.
NJ definitely gets its share of clear days in the winter, like all of the Northeast. I think there's a case for that part of the country (maybe as far south as South Jersey and as far north as Boston) having a very pleasant climate for those who *strongly* prefer a change of seasons. They're about as distinct as you can get without experiencing too much in the way of extremes. Like, Minneapolis experiences even sharper distinctions between the seasons, but you really pay a price in winter.
Agree 100%. Seattle winters can be dreary, but they're mild. And honestly I've mostly enjoyed at least *some* sunshine the several times I've been there in Jan/Feb. It's not like one *never* gets a sunny or partly sunny day there in winter (at least in my limited experience). And the summer. Oh. My. God. And the water, and the mountain views. For my money Seattle is the most physically beautiful major metro in the country by a nose over the Bay Area (though I haven't been to Portland).
I grew up with it, more or less. It's authentically pretty bad. It's not that a day or even a week of it is bad, but when you go three weeks without seeing the sun or the blue of the sky, and the clouds have been hanging featureless at 2000ft...
The aspect of Seattle winters that I would find hardest to deal with isn't the cloudiness but the shortness of the days. Anything above ~43° north is too high.
I went to Tulsa for work and was pleasantly surprised. Downtown is reasonably compact for a city in the great plains, it's green and leafy, and they have some nice amenities like the Gathering Place park. It has a much more distinct feel as a city than, say, OKC.
When I went in ~2016 I had also never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre; I feel like it's entered the national consciousness a lot more after the Watchmen HBO series and post-Floyd racial reckonings. Still they had a very thoughtful memorial that was educational, I remember walking around thinking "how have I not heard of this before?"
But to answer your question no, I would not move to Tulsa. I am a coastal elite and wide open spaces disperse my farts too quickly, which I need to smell to survive.
And I'm not sure there's any markers or remembrances. At least nothing is in the popular consciousness of these violent attacks against strikers and labor organizers, many of which claimed dozens of lives. In what was perhaps the worst, US Army planes dumped chemical weapons on striking miners in WV.
I came across the Ludlow massacre while reading an SB book referral about the peak of the anarchist movement in the US (The Infernal Machine). It was a pretty crazy period and I agree that not much has seeped into popular culture outside of vague references to the Pinkertons.
Honestly, think more Millennial and Gen Z folks should consider the longer term horizon benefits of setting roots down in one of the many mid-sized regional cities in / around the top 50 - 100 for population sizing.
Absolutely agree. I grew up in one of those cities and live in another. They are manageable, affordable, and have enough pro sports, cultural opportunities and diversity to keep life interesting. Great places to find community and raise a family.
That said, my personal theory is that a lot of people don’t actually want community and family when they factor in the trade-offs. One of those trade-offs might be living in an unfashionable city with more parochial neighbors.
I live in Baton Rouge, and thought it wasn’t my hometown…it was the largest city I have ever lived in (lived in many more smaller, in many states), and it’s fine.
Plenty of people who only ever lived here felt constricted and often fled to either NYC or New Orleans. 9 out of 10 who left for NYC in the 00s and ‘10s (for social reasons, not work reasons, exclusively mind you…) ultimately never found sustainable work and wasted a decade or more on rent before coming back (often to NOLA, where they still can’t afford to buy a home…in a city that has its own affordability crisis, among other issues).
Folks who just stayed here are mostly content and basically a decade ahead of everyone else in having homes and savings, living in the hip mid city area of the city that recently saw a lot of infill development (and price appreciation). Oddly enough, people always cite conservative politics as the reason to leave BR…but it’s been Democratically controlled basically for two decades (it is majority black city, 44%) …but because even white liberal / progressive social is still VERY segregated…people just never “felt” that, i guess.
This anecdotal evidence is sorta why i eye roll when people cite jobs as the reason lots of kids from mid sized cities move to big urban areas, from my experience the vast majority of college educated (graduate or drop outs) 20 something were 100% just moving for entertainment and social reasons…
I mean, I can easily see a city dominated by an older black Democratic cadre + what Republicans and white moderates exist being too conservative for people who are already politically minded and left-leaning on various social issues.
Sure, but this often just came from people who never even ventured into the black spaces to begin with and so it was a very odd way to frame that criticism (which really wasn’t about politics so much as it was about culture, i assure you)
- Land prices much less expensive, you can get more housing / land at an earlier age.
- Often significant populations of highly educated people to socialize with, thanks to cities often having state or private universities.
- Many are within reasonable driving distance of top 10 population centers for access expanded entertainment options.
- Internet / cultural turnover is such that popular cultural trends or amenities that first appear in tier 1 cities now appear much sooner in these regional cities, where it used to take like a decade for ramen restaurants to make it to town it now takes a year or two.
I’m not sure about that last point - when I lived in College Station, TX, two years ago, I usually got two day deliveries from Amazon, but a few things were next day. But moving to Southern California, most things are next day, and a reasonable number are available for 7 am, or even same day if you order in the morning. There are some ways that Internet services are actually producing more advantages for central locations.
As a LSU Alum (and Baton Rouge, somewhere in the mid 60s rank for metro areas) i am obligated by the SEC bylaws to to dunk on College Station by observing that it’s somewhere in the 180s on the list of metro areas sizes… and note that when I lived in Texas all the other residents joked that they didn’t even know where College Station is in on the map of Texas (frankly, I still can’t point it out!)
I didn't really like A&M or College Station, but College Station being small and obscure has been a weird meme for a long time. It's not an unusually small place by state college town standards. Compared to a few others:
The thing that always confuses me about Baton Rouge is that I can't remember which of Cain's or Layne's is the one from College Station and which is from Baton Rouge. As a non-meat-eater, I can't even tell the difference between them - they're rhyming chicken finger restaurants with the same black pepper and mustard sauce.
(But also, College Station has been growing at over 20% per decade for every single decade it has existed, while Baton Rouge hasn't hit that rate since the 1970s, and has even been negative in two recent decades. At that rate, it's only about 3 decades before Bryan/College Station passes Baton Rouge.)
Also, i didn’t mean delivery from Amazon so much as just chain restaurants or non-chain trend restaurants or non-chain businesses that often filter out from too tier cities to other regions.
Yeah that sort of thing definitely seemed about 20 years behind the times in College Station - there was one mediocre Indian restaurant while I lived there, and several mediocre Thai restaurants, but I hear there's a decent Indian restaurant or two now. But new businesses were still mostly burgers, tacos, or kolaches.
I think 50-100 is probably asking too much for most people in this boat, but I *would* go so far as to say:
1. If you can choose to live wherever you want and you can't live near family for whatever reason, then you should try to live in the smallest city you can tolerate. It's a healthy practice.
2. If you genuinely feel a strong pull toward living in a very large city I'm not going to judge, but there are some people who spend their 20s, 30s, and even 40s hopping around between NYC/SF/LA/London/other ultra-fashionable cities whenever they feel bored without ever putting down roots anywhere, and they are the worst.
In Europe I feel like the perfect city size is around 1 million inhabitants which probably translates to 2 million inhabitants in the US to account for the suburban character of most American cities. But anything between 500k and 5 million is good I think. Under 500k - too little to see/do. Over 5 mil - too much friction and distances.
I disagree that NIMBYism really even comes into for most cities, though those folks exist, because in general the trend has been for folks to move out of them.
It’s certainly not hard to build in many of them, the real issue is that there is a ton of competition for jobs and many states lose because other states are more willing to cut much better tax deals for companies, etc.
Unless you come in sufficient numbers to turn a very solidly red state into something more politically livable, stay where you are. I speak as a Texan, and it's pure hell in this part of the world. Texas actually copied Oklahoma on putting the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms. My profession/vocation is Christian ministry, and this kind of crap is almost enough to make me want to renounce my faith. Tulsa has some lovely qualities and places, but if you live in Tulsa, you're in Oklahoma--can't unyoke those two.
This is a pretty ironic statement, considering that the Ten Commandments do not actually represent the core principles of Christian theology, which is not a philosophy of ethics.
I, personally, can't imagine myself ever moving to Tulsa or anywhere else in Oklahoma--seems very low on places I'd like to go to.
But while it would be nice to say that, if this is successful, it's an indication of the value workers place on working remotely, it's more likely a Housing Theory Of Everything result that would not be as successful if popular cities did the work to change their laws to allow more housing to be built and thus be more affordable to live in.
Long time reading, first time poster. I was in the leadership of Tulsa’s local young professional group when Tulsa Remote launched. At the time, we had significant evidence that IF people relocated here, most liked it and stayed. But getting people to even try it out was very hard. When Corporate HQs moved here, it was hard to get executives to follow. Tulsa Remote was born, in part, from those findings. Many other midsized cities have tried similar programs without the incredible success of Tulsa. Large credit goes to the private foundation that funds Tulsa Remote and created a community of “remoters.” Also, the selection process screened for people who would get involved in community building, not just stay in their (comparatively large and cheap) house for a year. Overall, it was a well researched, well executed project. As a Tulsan for life, thank you for noticing and bringing attention to the program!
People with options are going to choose where they're comfort and doubly so if you're not the 'default' in society.
Good luck convincing too many pro-choice women or LGBT folks to make the move to Tulsa (and with recent developments, same thing for immigrant Asian or Hispanics) when even if they want to find somewhere cheaper to live, purple places like North Carolina, Atlanta, or y'know, Minneapolis and Chicago are still relatively cheap, if you don't mind freezing 5-7 months out of the year.
I see people saying this, but I’m skeptical this has actually borne out purely based on the success of this program and others like it. My mother is the sort of person who constantly talks about moving from the college town in Missouri where she lives now to the Pacific Northwest (where she grew up) because of politics, but when push comes to shove, my parents aren’t willing to live in a house half to a third the size, spend substantially less on travel and food, and otherwise nuke their quality of life just to marginally change the news headlines she reads. People have a sneakily strong revealed preference for money!
Older people w/ houses, families, connections, etc. are a different beast than 20-somethings out of college who have the option to where they're going to live and also, plenty of 20-somethings do move to places like NYC, LA, Seattle, and San Francisco to 'nuke their quality of life' largely because think QOL is about more than the size of your house and while your mother may only care about the 'headlines', a sexually active 24-year old woman or transgender man has worries beyond just the headlines, but the actual laws being passed in those states.
So why is Tulsa growing faster than Minneapolis or Chicago? Just a bunch of losers with no options? And are so many Americans moving to Texas and Florida because they don't feel respected or comfortable in New York and California?
1.) Housing and people really don't like the cold. Also, most people don't care about politics all that much.
2.) I mean, yes, well most of it is just housing and again, people hate the cold (see the continued drop in population in the wider New England and Mid-Atlantic area), there is some people who have openly said they're moving from New York and California because its too liberal/too woke/etc.
Those people are indeed, losers. With options. But losers nonetheless.
Again, the vast amount of migratory patterns in America since the invention of A/C do not line up w/ political, economic, or even cultural factors - its moving from colder climates to warmer climbates.
>see the continued drop in population in the wider New England and Mid-Atlantic area<
Per the 2020 census Massachusetts grew faster than any state east of Minnesota and north of Virginia. And I thought I read that the state recently surpassed its 2020 figure (which, like many US states, apparently suffered a Covid-era drop). The other NE states are holding on, too, and some have seen a pick up in growth (eg Maine) IIRC. To be sure New England isn't growing rapidly, and it wouldn't surprise if if it shifts into shrinkage before too long (especially if NIMBY policies prevail). But for now the region seems to be avoiding excessive demographic decline.
At what point will the migration patterns reverse due to climate change? If Florida has triple-digit temperatures and 100% humidity several months of the year, not being able to leave the air conditioned house without feeling like you’re gonna suffocate has to kind of suck.
I'd guess never because most people already live entirely indoors. Las Vegas and Phoenix are unbearable without AC in the summer, yet people still move there. I know adding humidity would make it much worse, but would it change anything to go from "I'm not going outside" to "I'm really not going outside"?
I hope that happens, but it sounds politically impossible. Probably even worse than fire insurance in CA, because waterfront properties are presumably the most expensive and thus best politically connected.
That's really sad! Is it really so common to stay indoors all the time? Don't people enjoy hiking or letting their kids play in the backyard/a local park? What about American traditions like playing softball or grilling or having a picnic?
A place where you can never go outside would feel like living on the Moon, without the coolness and wow factor of, you know, living on the actual Moon.
As an individual young liberal woman or LGBTQ person, it makes perfect sense to GTFO of Red states, but if all like-minded people do that, then the Red states get redder and then good luck ever winning the Senate!
Yeah, I'm sure that gay people and gay bars exists in Oklahoma, but I live in New York City and the scenes in Tulsa or OKC would be pretty depressing downgrades.
I was one of the few people who stayed in my average hometown still bigger than Tulsa from my high school honors class instead of going to SF/NY and while it worked out fine I attribute it largely to one specific lucky break. The modal outcome of the other people who stayed is stuck in middle-class version of dead end job, single approaching 40, basically an upscale version of a NEET, and every day I feel like “there but for the grace of God go I.” Average cities are great if you already are married with kids and appreciate the affordable housing but it’s a trap for people just starting out.
Would you consider a place like Sacramento average, or not-average because of its proximity to the Bay Area? Because other than summer heat waves, it's a really great place to have a moderately-above-average income, even in your 20s.
Still staggeringly expensive to get on the home-ownership ladder, though, isn't it (by the standards of all but 8 or 9 other metros)?
EDIT: I should have googled before commenting. The interweb tells me median SFH price is about $500k. That's way less than I thought—about half of Boston and less than a third of Bay Area. I guess I thought the proximity of the latter had driven home prices higher.
Incredible collection of art deco architecture in downtown Tulsa
I’m not sure you all on the coasts understand the incredible pettiness of midwesterners towards their neighbors and I flatly refuse to believe there is something nice in Tulsa
Damn skippy. The only nice architecture is in STL. Chicago manages to occasionally not be completely shitty. And fuck KC with Satan’s million-horned cock.
**glares in Chicago**
Chicago is a wonderful place
It is! People (FOX News, mostly) shit on Chicago, but it’s a world-class city without the rudeness of New York and the pretentiousness of Los Angeles. I will give New York respect for its pizza (although our tavern-style pizza is very good; it’s just a secret we don’t share with outsiders). And for most people, LA’s weather is superior. But I like having 4 distinct seasons and waterfront access, so Chicago is my sweet spot.
The Art Institute and Field Museum are awesome! Sue the T-rex for the win!
Anyone reading this, if you're visiting Chicago and have some spare time, I recommend you go up to Evanston and check out the Baha'i temple, it's beautiful! Great place for silent contemplation.
I thought that boat tour they do there was going to be corny, but it turned out to be pretty great.
And the alleys really are the straw that stirs the drink!
Chi-dogs certainly have much to recommend them
On some level the Fox types just don't understand how big cities are (y'know, barring the dishonest people working for them who live in said cities). Southside Chicago isn't Central Park across from the Congressional Hotel (if I'm remembering names wrong).
“4 distinct seasons”
I thought you all were supposed to be nice?
Ha I think that mostly true but having petty regional rivalries is how we pass time.
I'm spending the weekend in Cleveland later this month. First visit. Is that Midwest?
I would say geographically yeah but in spirit no. You haven’t truly entered flyover country yet
And while Chicago is an awesome city and definitely Midwest you don’t get the experience until you are staring at endless corn fields
We did that back in April and found it to be a lot of fun, at least around Case Western. Never did see anyone’s actual house or neighborhood
Another bad impact from the decline in remote work. In a world with a more mobile workforce stationary bandits have that much less power. Interesting counterfactual if remote work had remained dominant is local governments intensely competing to build desirable communities.
Let's talk about it on Substack live
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
“Sir, this is a Yimby’s.”
I know Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and you, sir, are no Bruce Willis.
ONE. BILLION. TULSANS.
Somehow I get the feeling that would actually ruin the neighborhood character… for once.
Not if you turned Tulsa into a miniature Coruscant, with 100+ vertically stacked residential levels connected by elevators and hover cars/airships, the rich elite near the top, the seedy underworld at the bottom, it would be rad! Tourists would come from all over to visit! Beware shady characters in cantinas offering to sell you death sticks.
Tulsa's current sprawl radius is about 30 km. At a billion people that's 350K people per sq km, compared to 28K for Manhattan. But if we double the radius it drops to 88K, which seems theoretically possible with current technology.
Finally a sane person. My slightly less intense take is that the Bay Area should look like the outer parts of Hong Kong: Super dense collections of sky scrapers, connected by public transport, with plenty land left for hiking. But we should build 50-500 sky scrapers and see what happens.
Hive City Tulsa Prime
Chairman Yang approves.
I hate you.
Hey, don’t blame me for taking Yglesias YIMBY/Abundance thought to its logical conclusion! 😆
In the interest of civility, I will wish your flies as long of lives as they can manage.
I would not for a few reasons. Fully remote doesn't work for most roles long term in terms of the health of the business. While some roles will remain remote the chances of getting a new one after a layoff are getting pretty slim.
Which brings up the next issue - I've seen in markets like Tulsa employees and employers fighting to a draw. Employees can't leave as there are no comparable roles within a commutable distance. Employers know there are also no potential candidates within a commutable distance either. So it ends up in a not healthy place employment wise.
It still amazes me, utterly amazes me, that it took some organizations five years to figure this out. And some still seemingly haven't!
It’s like several other topics: people really, really *wanted* to believe it, and felt like good people while wanting to believe it.
Which part, that companies took a long time to realize “remote doesn’t work”?
That's stronger language than I'd use. More like "it's hard-to-impossible to create and maintain company culture when you're all in your separate living rooms, you're accumulating all sorts of technical debt, and the longer you let people think this is the new normal, the more they will believe you".
That’s fair. I work remote for big tech, I think something like 80% have RTO’d. It’s a funny equilibrium where all of my meetings have ~50% of people dialing in from different locations, whether that’s home, an office in a different city, or just a different building at the ”same” office. And because of this distribution, going into the office doesn’t feel like it adds much to the experience. Some teams are different though and I would bet they are more productive.
There's a special place in Hell for people who call in from a different room in the same building.
Maybe not in Hell. There's a special place in Heck.
In principle true, but some of these buildings are at least 1/2 mile long…
We went back to the office in my workplace but kept the same zillion Zoom meetings on everyone's schedule, so half the time my office mate and I both have Zoom meetings at the same time. Finding a room where you won't bug anyone else can be tricky!
I try to teams call from my desk instead of meetings every chance. It is like a 10+min effort to disconnect and re-setup my monitors, headset, etc. plus the Windows freak out when they jump between screens
I am at a big tech company that is still very remote friendly and I just happen to live ten minutes away from HQ. All my teammates are spread out around North America, so there’s no collaboration happening in the office. I go in 1-2x/week and treat it like a WeWork; get away from the pile of laundry and kids crap piled up and focus for a 1/2 day and partake of the snacks
Do you think this will ever change? Was it like this in the before times?
Agree! As somebody who does niche IT consulting and basically becomes an expensive temp employee for 6-24 months at places all over the country - there are definitely smaller cities like Tulsa that have like 3 big companies that end up being the options for specialized professional roles. You're an internal auditor or database administrator - you basically can only work at those 3 companies. Wages end up being so much lower than nationally.
And it can end up like some kind of bad codependent marriage - I hate you but I can't quit. Well I hate you more but I can't fire you.
The healthcare analytics company I work for has been remote since 2014 and we're landing blowing up right now despite none of the executive team or the data science group living in the same city.
I have a buddy who works for FINRA and said that since they mandated people come back to work a couple times a week, they're losing a massive amount of talent (mostly analysts and IT) that got used to working remotely.
I'm extroverted and loved working in person, but (at least for programmers) it seems like it's remote or bust.
" they're losing a massive amount of talent"
Yeh but every article I read says the job market is terrible. So it's at least plausible that he's not a reliable narrator?
I'll give you a funny example - keep in mind the average manger is average and half of them are even worse. Anyway at a customer someone who was fully remote quit and never told anybody - they just stopped doing any work. 9 months later they were found and their manager sent them a meeting invite to discuss they emailed back - "I quit."
We certainly had more than a few grumpy departures when we brought our last cohort back full-time in summer of '21. Call it one engineer or developer in twenty.
Interestingly, they were all of the people we could very most afford to lose.
IIRC J.P. Morgan found the vast majority of its top performers were already in the office so they figured what have we got to lose. And they were right - the worst performers were also the ones most likely to quit is asked to come in.
Some companies and employees are successful with it and some are not.
Ironically I think tech is the white-collar industry where remote work works least well.
He (and many others) moved out of DC when they went full remote, then they asked them all to make 2+ hour commutes each way. His boss left and so did many of his best coworkers. He took a buyout after working there for 17 years.
I do know another guy who totally ghosted his company (may have been Wells Fargo?) when he was totally remote and his boss left for another gig. His co-workers didn't know what his assignment was or who he was reporting to and it took a few months for them to catch on. He's not there anymore (don't know if quit or fired).
Our company is still small enough ~200 employees) that we have daily scrums companywide and within our group. Everyone also has multiple weekly meetings with various clients. I can't imagine getting away with not showing up unannounced for even a week.
I’m tentatively in favor of basically making most support roles remote. Core operations, no. But payroll? Have a couple reps onsite and outsource the rest to some B2B SAAS grindset asshole.
Not payroll you want the people doing the work to fear being dragged to the parking lot for a good beating if the direct deposits don't go through. Seriously when people are remote they begin to thing it's all not real - that there aren't people at the other end of the ACH.
Oof good catch bro! Yeah i guess that’s a good exception.
There are no exceptions - if there are lay their ass off.
Meh, there’s a lot of support work that is valuable. But mature firms tend to overindulge in it.
I'm going to be very curious what the next administration does about remote work/teleworking in the Federal government...
Makes a lot of sense for feds since they can't compete on pay.
They’d *really* need to get rid of the job protections, though I guess they don’t have those post-DOGE? If you can’t easily be fired for not doing shit, you really don’t need to be doing remote work. (For the record I’m mostly against fully remote work, there should be an expectation that everyone’s in the office but flexibility when possible)
Most feds theoretically still have job protections, but yeah...kind of hard to tell what will happen a year from now. A lot of the schedule F stuff is still getting worked out, at which point Trump can fire rank and file people for whatever. If anything, assuming schedule F sticks, you'd imagine the feds needing to pay a wage premium to make up for the loss in stability, but that won't happen given the way the scale works. I think the most likely scenario for feds is 0% pay raises for the next 4 years.
I used to work for the feds in a field that recruits a lot of PhDs/MDs, and remote work was a major blessing. Many people with PhDs/MDs also have spouses with doctorates, so you pretty regularly encounter two-body problems when recruiting. It's really hard to get a health physicist to move their entire family across the country when you can only pay $100k, but it's a great deal if one spouse is already locked into a university and you can offer the other a remote position.
Setting aside the merits of in-person/telework, the current admin has been a complete nightmare, and it doesn't really seem analogous to private sector RTO. I have a friend who was assigned office space in a building without internet. They were remote to begin with, so none of their coworkers are even located in the same state. There doesn't really seem to be any point to it beyond trying to get people to quit.
Yeah, I have a friend that manages a team for a federal agency and she had mixed feelings about RTO. She was pretty sure it would get two people to quit, one of whom wasn’t doing any work (was working a second job and just phoning the Fed job in) while the other was highly productive (a military spouse that was no longer stationed in DC). She was happy to lose the first but not the second. It’s a mixed bag. I have no idea how that all shook out with DOGE though
At least where I worked, you could have easily fired the first guy for working an outside job without prior approval. Military spouses are theoretically supposed to be eligible for remote work, but I've heard none of the paperwork is getting approved.
I think what makes the DOGE stuff so very different from private sector restructurings is how completely disconnected it is from any sense of organizational improvement or why stuff is happening (...unless you think the destruction is the point). People are understandably always upset when organizational change happens, but most people would at least agree that their senior leadership team thinks they're acting in the best interest of the organization. I would love to see federal employee viewpoint survey results this year, but the Trump admin canceled them. Of the measurable metrics the federal government does have (call wait times, grant disbursements), everything is quite literally worse than it was 7 months ago.
It's hard to generalize about the federal government because it is so large and covers many different functions, but that's why it always made sense to let agencies at least have some discretion in their own staffing or work policies. Recruiting/pay/retention issues look very different at CDC/FDA compared to somewhere like IRS/SSA.
So what happens if you can't compete on pay, job stability, or quality of life? I guess you just get people who didn't have any other options. Fortunately, we don't expect federal employees to do anything really important like make sure commercial aviation or drugs offered for sale in the US are safe or anything like that, so no problem, I guess.
If that’s true, and the NIMBY cartels hold, there won’t be any point to education or white collar career paths after a while. The luckiest middle managers at our children’s equivalent of FAANG will be living in with their parents, and the transplants among them hot bunking in the Central Valley.
eh, I moved from Southern CA to South West Oregon. Town of 20k people, and I live about 30 mins away in an area with less than 1,000 people.
Yeah, there's not a lot of opportunity here, but I like my job and there's no way I could have a similar quality of life moving somewhere else because of the cost of housing.
How much less did you end up spending on housing as a percentage of gross?
Well, from where I moved I actually spent a bit more, but that's because we sold our track home, and bought a 20 acre ranch (with a house almost twice as big)
If we moved back to a bigger city, we would be back in a much smaller track house.
That's not a trade we want to do. Not to mention there's multiple lakes and rivers here within a short drive we can take the kids swimming or wake boarding in. And no GATORS!
Either the reptile kind or the UF kind are a no go, I agree
Can you point me to articles, studies, etc. that show how "fully remote work doesn't work... in terms of the health of the business"? As a software engineer, I've been surprised by the push to go back to the office. I was previously with Walmart and my general assumption was that their push back to being in the office was really just a way to facilitate layoffs rather than actually wanting people in the office. But that assumption was based on nothing beyond knowing that I'm not personally any less productive at home.
What is your definition of productive? Writing the code that you've been told to write. That's the part thr AIs are getting good at. Knowing what the business or customer needs is the hard part and the part you can best asses by meeting with people in person.
If you're just writing code the business analyst has specd out - I'm not sure what kind of future that has anymore.
If my definition of productivity differs, then that only adds to my interest in understanding the assessments being made by corporate leadership. That's what I'm asking for -- something that helps clarify how these assessments are being made.
Given how widespread the push to go back to the office has been, I'm guessing there is validity to it. I just don't know what is in those assessments!
I would push back as there are a number of great companies that are fully remote (Zapier is the first large one that comes to mind but there are others). The issue with remote is that it requires a culture, tools, and processes that support remote success.
During the pandemic, a lot of companies and institutions went remote without changing anything. When they saw productivity slide, they chalked it up to remote not working and mandated return to office.
There are a number of advantages to remote work for institutions like better skill alignment and reduced office costs but you have to work at it to make it successful.
Zapier has 700 employees. It also seems to be in the software industry where its product integrates other software. For Exxon or Ford or Walmart or the Cleveland Clinic where you have surgeons and offshore oil platform workers and test tracks and such - it's not a remote friendly business.
It's like the new Boeing CEO pulling everyone back to the office next to the factory. What do you mean the new empennage flange capacitor isn't seating properly? Let's walk over and take a look.
Arguably, offshore workers have always been out of the office.
In all seriousness, I agree that there are plenty of jobs that require you to be in a facility (i.e. manufacturing) or in a designated customer service center (i.e. a casier) that can't be made remote. I would argue, though, that any job in an office where the sole equipment is a computer and work can be measured by output can in principal be done from anywhere.
The question about culture is whether Walmart can ask a warehouse worker to work in person while a marketer to work remotely. I think the answer is maybe, but you will probably have to try hard to make it work.
One thing I noticed coming back was mentoring. I've got a couple younger coworkers who kinda need some hand-holding, and when I was mostly remote, I just couldn't do the level of that that was needed. I think I'm less productive now in my formal work (writing text and code, mostly), but much more productive in my interactions with coworkers.
I grew up near Tulsa and still have lots of family and friends there. There are many things that I really love about the area, including cultural opportunities, a lot of the people, recreational opportunities, etc.
But there are also some significant reasons I would never move there or encourage people I cared about to move there.
1) Sate politics are so extremely right wing. I was a republican until 2016, and I’m still a relatively conservative independent, but Oklahoma politics make me ill. In particular what they are doing to education in Oklahoma is really disgusting. Also the impacts state politics have on healthcare available in the state are negative.
2) The religious climate. I’m a Christian and my faith is really important to me. Tulsa has the biggest concentration of terrible Christian hypocrites I have ever encountered. I mean, really all the stereotypes you hear about people going to church on Sunday and then abusing their families or cheating in their business. Where I live now in Massachusetts, nobody bothers to claim to be a Christian unless they actually care about it, but in Oklahoma it’s really culturally expected that you are and so a lot of people claim faith is something important to them, but don’t at all live it out.
3) Tornadoes. Tornadoes are unpredictable and scary and pretty common. My high school was destroyed by a tornado, the school that my mom taught at was destroyed by another, the church I attended, was destroyed by yet another, and my stepsister barely escaped being killed by another (she just got out of her car in time and when they found it later, it was on top of a three-story building nearby and completely crushed). I really love living in a place without natural disasters!
I could live next to BYU. I couldn't live next to Oral Roberts.
Ha both of my parents in law went there. They’re both MSNBC liberals, surprisingly enough. Hey, it was a place to hide from the draft
Even my cousin's husband who was a pretty conservative Baptist pastor from Tulsa thought the Oral Roberts people were crazy.
Back during the draft, ORU would take you without a high school diploma. They were drafting everyone with a pulse in my FIL’s small South Texas town right after high school, so he dropped out at 17 to go to ORU to avoid it. I think they got a pretty solid education there at the time, though.
Ha! I had no idea. I know they're big in to speaking in tongues but that's it.
Yeah. Both of my in laws are devout, but neither of them are conservative Christians or Pentecostals, more Methodist types. MIL was a social worker which doesn’t really lend itself to conservative politics - I mean they were Mondale and Dukakis voters lol and religiously watch Maddow. My family was much more conservative, my mom didn’t start voting for Democrats until Trump
And they had a crazy Match Madness run a few years ago.
Your #2 describes a fascinating phenomenon I had not previously thought about. Thanks for sharing!
As a Northwesterner, it's fascinating and also completely foreign to me.
I lived in Fort Worth for 15 years, one of my friends there was from OK and said about the same thing about politics and religion. Concerning item #3: my wife and I were driving through Duncan or Moore somewheres (we both remarked how beautiful OK was, seemed greener once we crossed the Red River TX state line). My wife said OK looked so much cleaner than TX...maybe, she said, its because people keep things picked up because they dont want things blowing around in tornadoes. I said, I think its the other way around, theres so many tornadoes they've clear everything out that wasnt bolted down 😂
You should encourage people to move there to flip their electoral votes.
Pittsburgh tops my underrated US cities that I would move to list. (Based on one visit on a beautiful September weekend).
I usually list Houston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia as the most underrated cities, but Pittsburgh probably fits too (except that in my world, U of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon are so prominent that Pittsburgh gets a lot more attention than Philadelphia, and I sort of thought that Uber buying the whole robotics department from CMU did this more broadly).
I live in Baltimore and am a Baltimore Evangelist! This place has everything you need, whet you are single, in a childless relationship, or have children! I absolutely love it! But it's probably not as cheap as Tulsa...
"But it's probably not as cheap as Tulsa" Depends on the neighborhood LOL
I love Baltimore too but had to move because commuting to DC every day became too much.
“Baltimore, even the ducks pack heat.”
This is a good list. A smaller city I was pleasantly surprised by was Richmond, VA.
I have not been there yet!
I second Houston, the Museum District is great! Also lots of good places to eat.
Similarly, I can see why Detroit gets crap but I had a really nice work trip there and managed to fit in a lot of touristy stops. Really lovely city.
I've found that Detroit has improved dramatically over the last 15 years. And there's still room for improvement!
Unfortunately, they've still got a bad case of Lions.
It's way better to be a Lions fan today than 15 years ago!
The Tigers are good, to boot!
I believe you mean the DERTROIT BEISBOLCATS
Detroit sports are starting to emerge from a real nasty low for all four major teams.
Detroit is growing again after 70 years. Metro Atlanta is experiencing net domestic out-migration. Strange times.
Love hearing that, I hope they continue the trend.
Detroit can mean a lot of things. It can mean the actual City of Detroit, which is certainly better now than when I moved there in the late 90s. But it still has plenty of issues, number one being the schools. Detroit can also mean Metro Detroit, which I moved to when the City of just wouldn’t cut it, and that’s basically just a variation of midwest suburbs. Detroit at a stretch could even include the People’s Republic of Ann Arbor, just 20 minutes or so away.
Big NYT article about Detroit over the weekend, btw: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/realestate/downtown-detroit-is-back.html
I too had a similar reaction to Pittsburgh, except it was October I was there.
Feels similar to me not understanding why everyone in the world hasn't moved to Seattle yet, on an 80-degree August day
Seattle-area summers are basically paradise for outdoorsy types. 80-degree highs, low humidity, light out until 10PM, and all the mountains you can hike and/or bike trails that you can ride. Unfortunately that only lasts about 4-5 months of the year (although the skiing is also pretty great in winter in the Cascades).
Everyone's got their preferences, but I was always fine trading off some sunshine in exchange for just misty rain as opposed to brutally cold and humid weather.
Brutal cold is great *if* it snows. The worst type of winter is what you get in New Jersey: cold enough that you have to put on layers and all the trees are bare and the grass is dead, but not cold enough that is snows, so instead of a winter wonderland you end up both cold *and* wet.
Snow is such a pain to get around town with when it's around, though. Leave it up in the mountains. I do agree that sleet is even worse, though.
Sometimes I enjoy a crisp snowless winter day. The air's refreshing and smells nice and the feeling of going into a warm house is very enjoyable, as is drinking a hot drink outside. But yes it has to be dry. Cold rain is no good.
NJ definitely gets its share of clear days in the winter, like all of the Northeast. I think there's a case for that part of the country (maybe as far south as South Jersey and as far north as Boston) having a very pleasant climate for those who *strongly* prefer a change of seasons. They're about as distinct as you can get without experiencing too much in the way of extremes. Like, Minneapolis experiences even sharper distinctions between the seasons, but you really pay a price in winter.
Agree 100%. Seattle winters can be dreary, but they're mild. And honestly I've mostly enjoyed at least *some* sunshine the several times I've been there in Jan/Feb. It's not like one *never* gets a sunny or partly sunny day there in winter (at least in my limited experience). And the summer. Oh. My. God. And the water, and the mountain views. For my money Seattle is the most physically beautiful major metro in the country by a nose over the Bay Area (though I haven't been to Portland).
Yeah, I want to be a snowbird someday
How bad could the winter gray rain be? Isn't it just time for indoor hobbies?
I grew up with it, more or less. It's authentically pretty bad. It's not that a day or even a week of it is bad, but when you go three weeks without seeing the sun or the blue of the sky, and the clouds have been hanging featureless at 2000ft...
The rain, as such, is fine. It's the dreariness.
The aspect of Seattle winters that I would find hardest to deal with isn't the cloudiness but the shortness of the days. Anything above ~43° north is too high.
My brother got seasonal depression and moved out after 3 winters, YMMV
Rain
I lived there for five years. If there were good jobs in my field there, I might well have stayed.
agree on pittsburgh. also want to add that columbus is a very easy city to live in, although it lacks in culture stuff
We just visited for the first time and loved it - decent access to the NE still as well
I went to Tulsa for work and was pleasantly surprised. Downtown is reasonably compact for a city in the great plains, it's green and leafy, and they have some nice amenities like the Gathering Place park. It has a much more distinct feel as a city than, say, OKC.
When I went in ~2016 I had also never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre; I feel like it's entered the national consciousness a lot more after the Watchmen HBO series and post-Floyd racial reckonings. Still they had a very thoughtful memorial that was educational, I remember walking around thinking "how have I not heard of this before?"
But to answer your question no, I would not move to Tulsa. I am a coastal elite and wide open spaces disperse my farts too quickly, which I need to smell to survive.
Kind of a tangent - but anytime I've dug into history I have the reaction of "why haven't I heard of this before"?
I live very close to where several of the worst of these took place:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_United_States_labor_disputes?utm_source=chatgpt.com
And I'm not sure there's any markers or remembrances. At least nothing is in the popular consciousness of these violent attacks against strikers and labor organizers, many of which claimed dozens of lives. In what was perhaps the worst, US Army planes dumped chemical weapons on striking miners in WV.
I came across the Ludlow massacre while reading an SB book referral about the peak of the anarchist movement in the US (The Infernal Machine). It was a pretty crazy period and I agree that not much has seeped into popular culture outside of vague references to the Pinkertons.
Subscribed just to comment. Yes--you should all move to Tulsa.
Matt, it seems like you should commission a defense of moving to Tulsa piece from me. (I'm cheap.) I moved from DC to Tulsa in Dec 2023.
Honestly, think more Millennial and Gen Z folks should consider the longer term horizon benefits of setting roots down in one of the many mid-sized regional cities in / around the top 50 - 100 for population sizing.
Absolutely agree. I grew up in one of those cities and live in another. They are manageable, affordable, and have enough pro sports, cultural opportunities and diversity to keep life interesting. Great places to find community and raise a family.
That said, my personal theory is that a lot of people don’t actually want community and family when they factor in the trade-offs. One of those trade-offs might be living in an unfashionable city with more parochial neighbors.
I live in Baton Rouge, and thought it wasn’t my hometown…it was the largest city I have ever lived in (lived in many more smaller, in many states), and it’s fine.
Plenty of people who only ever lived here felt constricted and often fled to either NYC or New Orleans. 9 out of 10 who left for NYC in the 00s and ‘10s (for social reasons, not work reasons, exclusively mind you…) ultimately never found sustainable work and wasted a decade or more on rent before coming back (often to NOLA, where they still can’t afford to buy a home…in a city that has its own affordability crisis, among other issues).
Folks who just stayed here are mostly content and basically a decade ahead of everyone else in having homes and savings, living in the hip mid city area of the city that recently saw a lot of infill development (and price appreciation). Oddly enough, people always cite conservative politics as the reason to leave BR…but it’s been Democratically controlled basically for two decades (it is majority black city, 44%) …but because even white liberal / progressive social is still VERY segregated…people just never “felt” that, i guess.
This anecdotal evidence is sorta why i eye roll when people cite jobs as the reason lots of kids from mid sized cities move to big urban areas, from my experience the vast majority of college educated (graduate or drop outs) 20 something were 100% just moving for entertainment and social reasons…
I mean, I can easily see a city dominated by an older black Democratic cadre + what Republicans and white moderates exist being too conservative for people who are already politically minded and left-leaning on various social issues.
Sure, but this often just came from people who never even ventured into the black spaces to begin with and so it was a very odd way to frame that criticism (which really wasn’t about politics so much as it was about culture, i assure you)
Many (most?) people absolutely do not want the mutual obligations that community and family entail.
- Land prices much less expensive, you can get more housing / land at an earlier age.
- Often significant populations of highly educated people to socialize with, thanks to cities often having state or private universities.
- Many are within reasonable driving distance of top 10 population centers for access expanded entertainment options.
- Internet / cultural turnover is such that popular cultural trends or amenities that first appear in tier 1 cities now appear much sooner in these regional cities, where it used to take like a decade for ramen restaurants to make it to town it now takes a year or two.
I’m not sure about that last point - when I lived in College Station, TX, two years ago, I usually got two day deliveries from Amazon, but a few things were next day. But moving to Southern California, most things are next day, and a reasonable number are available for 7 am, or even same day if you order in the morning. There are some ways that Internet services are actually producing more advantages for central locations.
Honestly not sure that extra day for most items from Amazon is a deal breaker for me, to be frank…
Yeah I still don't have Prime. It's totally fine!
As a LSU Alum (and Baton Rouge, somewhere in the mid 60s rank for metro areas) i am obligated by the SEC bylaws to to dunk on College Station by observing that it’s somewhere in the 180s on the list of metro areas sizes… and note that when I lived in Texas all the other residents joked that they didn’t even know where College Station is in on the map of Texas (frankly, I still can’t point it out!)
I didn't really like A&M or College Station, but College Station being small and obscure has been a weird meme for a long time. It's not an unusually small place by state college town standards. Compared to a few others:
Ann Arbor, MI 150
Gainesville, FL 157
College Station, TX 176
Tuscaloosa, AL 178
San Luis Obispo, CA 179
Urbana-Champaign, IL 200
State College, PA 272
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
The thing that always confuses me about Baton Rouge is that I can't remember which of Cain's or Layne's is the one from College Station and which is from Baton Rouge. As a non-meat-eater, I can't even tell the difference between them - they're rhyming chicken finger restaurants with the same black pepper and mustard sauce.
(But also, College Station has been growing at over 20% per decade for every single decade it has existed, while Baton Rouge hasn't hit that rate since the 1970s, and has even been negative in two recent decades. At that rate, it's only about 3 decades before Bryan/College Station passes Baton Rouge.)
Also, i didn’t mean delivery from Amazon so much as just chain restaurants or non-chain trend restaurants or non-chain businesses that often filter out from too tier cities to other regions.
Yeah that sort of thing definitely seemed about 20 years behind the times in College Station - there was one mediocre Indian restaurant while I lived there, and several mediocre Thai restaurants, but I hear there's a decent Indian restaurant or two now. But new businesses were still mostly burgers, tacos, or kolaches.
Apparently Tulsa is 60th! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas?wprov=sfti1#2020_urban_areas
I would have assumed it was smaller, but it’s comparable to Albuquerque or Birmingham or Fresno or Rochester.
I think 50-100 is probably asking too much for most people in this boat, but I *would* go so far as to say:
1. If you can choose to live wherever you want and you can't live near family for whatever reason, then you should try to live in the smallest city you can tolerate. It's a healthy practice.
2. If you genuinely feel a strong pull toward living in a very large city I'm not going to judge, but there are some people who spend their 20s, 30s, and even 40s hopping around between NYC/SF/LA/London/other ultra-fashionable cities whenever they feel bored without ever putting down roots anywhere, and they are the worst.
In Europe I feel like the perfect city size is around 1 million inhabitants which probably translates to 2 million inhabitants in the US to account for the suburban character of most American cities. But anything between 500k and 5 million is good I think. Under 500k - too little to see/do. Over 5 mil - too much friction and distances.
Mid-sized regional cities are mid-sized for a reason (super NIMBYs)
I disagree that NIMBYism really even comes into for most cities, though those folks exist, because in general the trend has been for folks to move out of them.
It’s certainly not hard to build in many of them, the real issue is that there is a ton of competition for jobs and many states lose because other states are more willing to cut much better tax deals for companies, etc.
And here I am living in a similar sized city for free, like a chump.
Unless you come in sufficient numbers to turn a very solidly red state into something more politically livable, stay where you are. I speak as a Texan, and it's pure hell in this part of the world. Texas actually copied Oklahoma on putting the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms. My profession/vocation is Christian ministry, and this kind of crap is almost enough to make me want to renounce my faith. Tulsa has some lovely qualities and places, but if you live in Tulsa, you're in Oklahoma--can't unyoke those two.
I would argue it never should have come out in the first place. It was the glue holding our country together,
The Ten Commandments in classrooms was the glue holding our country together? I don't think they were ever in even a majority of classrooms.
No the dominant christian culture was
Bring back prayers in classrooms. Bring back to ten commandments
Even if you did that you wouldn’t bring back the dominant Christian culture! She gone.
This is a pretty ironic statement, considering that the Ten Commandments do not actually represent the core principles of Christian theology, which is not a philosophy of ethics.
It was a lot easier to believe in christianity 500 years ago...
Or in any of them
Personally I think church and state are separate for very good reasons, but I’d go for the Sermon on the Mount before the Ten Commandments any day
I, personally, can't imagine myself ever moving to Tulsa or anywhere else in Oklahoma--seems very low on places I'd like to go to.
But while it would be nice to say that, if this is successful, it's an indication of the value workers place on working remotely, it's more likely a Housing Theory Of Everything result that would not be as successful if popular cities did the work to change their laws to allow more housing to be built and thus be more affordable to live in.
Sweet - exactly on schedule and all is right with the world.
Long time reading, first time poster. I was in the leadership of Tulsa’s local young professional group when Tulsa Remote launched. At the time, we had significant evidence that IF people relocated here, most liked it and stayed. But getting people to even try it out was very hard. When Corporate HQs moved here, it was hard to get executives to follow. Tulsa Remote was born, in part, from those findings. Many other midsized cities have tried similar programs without the incredible success of Tulsa. Large credit goes to the private foundation that funds Tulsa Remote and created a community of “remoters.” Also, the selection process screened for people who would get involved in community building, not just stay in their (comparatively large and cheap) house for a year. Overall, it was a well researched, well executed project. As a Tulsan for life, thank you for noticing and bringing attention to the program!
Here is a nice article from one of the NY to Tulsa remoters: https://www.businessinsider.com/paid-to-move-oklahoma-tulsa-worth-it-remote-worker-2025-8
People with options are going to choose where they're comfort and doubly so if you're not the 'default' in society.
Good luck convincing too many pro-choice women or LGBT folks to make the move to Tulsa (and with recent developments, same thing for immigrant Asian or Hispanics) when even if they want to find somewhere cheaper to live, purple places like North Carolina, Atlanta, or y'know, Minneapolis and Chicago are still relatively cheap, if you don't mind freezing 5-7 months out of the year.
I see people saying this, but I’m skeptical this has actually borne out purely based on the success of this program and others like it. My mother is the sort of person who constantly talks about moving from the college town in Missouri where she lives now to the Pacific Northwest (where she grew up) because of politics, but when push comes to shove, my parents aren’t willing to live in a house half to a third the size, spend substantially less on travel and food, and otherwise nuke their quality of life just to marginally change the news headlines she reads. People have a sneakily strong revealed preference for money!
Older people w/ houses, families, connections, etc. are a different beast than 20-somethings out of college who have the option to where they're going to live and also, plenty of 20-somethings do move to places like NYC, LA, Seattle, and San Francisco to 'nuke their quality of life' largely because think QOL is about more than the size of your house and while your mother may only care about the 'headlines', a sexually active 24-year old woman or transgender man has worries beyond just the headlines, but the actual laws being passed in those states.
So why is Tulsa growing faster than Minneapolis or Chicago? Just a bunch of losers with no options? And are so many Americans moving to Texas and Florida because they don't feel respected or comfortable in New York and California?
1.) Housing and people really don't like the cold. Also, most people don't care about politics all that much.
2.) I mean, yes, well most of it is just housing and again, people hate the cold (see the continued drop in population in the wider New England and Mid-Atlantic area), there is some people who have openly said they're moving from New York and California because its too liberal/too woke/etc.
Those people are indeed, losers. With options. But losers nonetheless.
Again, the vast amount of migratory patterns in America since the invention of A/C do not line up w/ political, economic, or even cultural factors - its moving from colder climates to warmer climbates.
>see the continued drop in population in the wider New England and Mid-Atlantic area<
Per the 2020 census Massachusetts grew faster than any state east of Minnesota and north of Virginia. And I thought I read that the state recently surpassed its 2020 figure (which, like many US states, apparently suffered a Covid-era drop). The other NE states are holding on, too, and some have seen a pick up in growth (eg Maine) IIRC. To be sure New England isn't growing rapidly, and it wouldn't surprise if if it shifts into shrinkage before too long (especially if NIMBY policies prevail). But for now the region seems to be avoiding excessive demographic decline.
At what point will the migration patterns reverse due to climate change? If Florida has triple-digit temperatures and 100% humidity several months of the year, not being able to leave the air conditioned house without feeling like you’re gonna suffocate has to kind of suck.
I'd guess never because most people already live entirely indoors. Las Vegas and Phoenix are unbearable without AC in the summer, yet people still move there. I know adding humidity would make it much worse, but would it change anything to go from "I'm not going outside" to "I'm really not going outside"?
Climate change's impact would come if flood insurance stopped being subsidized (not sure this will happen) which would be disastrous for Florida.
I hope that happens, but it sounds politically impossible. Probably even worse than fire insurance in CA, because waterfront properties are presumably the most expensive and thus best politically connected.
That's really sad! Is it really so common to stay indoors all the time? Don't people enjoy hiking or letting their kids play in the backyard/a local park? What about American traditions like playing softball or grilling or having a picnic?
A place where you can never go outside would feel like living on the Moon, without the coolness and wow factor of, you know, living on the actual Moon.
I agree, but the heat is no joke! Every year some elderly people fall, can't get up, and suffer severe burns and/or heatstroke. This article says in AZ there were 157 people admitted to the burn center for things like that, of which 13 died. https://www.azfamily.com/2025/06/18/burns-falls-deadly-heat-how-arizonas-hot-weather-can-impact-seniors/
But the other 9 months of the year are nice.
If you never leave the house, why would you care a lot about the weather?
But this is a collective action problem, no?
As an individual young liberal woman or LGBTQ person, it makes perfect sense to GTFO of Red states, but if all like-minded people do that, then the Red states get redder and then good luck ever winning the Senate!
No, because I’m a single gay man and would only live in welcoming, socially progressive places with large LGBT populations, and … Oklahoma isn’t that!
(I’m sure Tulsa has some nice attributes and like most US cities has been treated very poorly in the post-WW2 era.)
There’s a neighborhood in Oklahoma City called Sparkleville. It used to be called the Gayborhood.
Yeah, I'm sure that gay people and gay bars exists in Oklahoma, but I live in New York City and the scenes in Tulsa or OKC would be pretty depressing downgrades.
Sparkleville? I have to assume The Gays named it.
I was one of the few people who stayed in my average hometown still bigger than Tulsa from my high school honors class instead of going to SF/NY and while it worked out fine I attribute it largely to one specific lucky break. The modal outcome of the other people who stayed is stuck in middle-class version of dead end job, single approaching 40, basically an upscale version of a NEET, and every day I feel like “there but for the grace of God go I.” Average cities are great if you already are married with kids and appreciate the affordable housing but it’s a trap for people just starting out.
There is nothing wrong with moving away when you are young and single and then moving back once you are older and have a family.
Yeah that’s probably the best way to do it. Main obstacles are job continuity and convincing your SO.
Would you consider a place like Sacramento average, or not-average because of its proximity to the Bay Area? Because other than summer heat waves, it's a really great place to have a moderately-above-average income, even in your 20s.
Still staggeringly expensive to get on the home-ownership ladder, though, isn't it (by the standards of all but 8 or 9 other metros)?
EDIT: I should have googled before commenting. The interweb tells me median SFH price is about $500k. That's way less than I thought—about half of Boston and less than a third of Bay Area. I guess I thought the proximity of the latter had driven home prices higher.
Yeah, Sacramento is still a place where "million-dollar home" means very high-end.
It's not a *cheap* place but it's pretty reasonable