After years of working to turn around the sinking population of Lincoln County, Kan., Kelly Gourley decided to try something new.
A local foundation was dispensing cash grants to counties for relocation incentives — not to businesses, the normal target of such enticements, but to workers.
Ms. Gourley, the director of economic development for the county, got the program running in 2023. In the first year, she got five takers: all remote workers, some with children in tow. It felt like a victory, and maybe the start of something that could restore some of the vibrancy that longtime residents remembered from decades past.
“Why put all our focus on businesses when we can just recruit people, go after families?” Ms. Gourley said. “They’ll bring their jobs with them, which means income that is coming in from everywhere else into our county.”
For the first time in a long time, the winds are at her back. The Covid-19 pandemic shook up where people were willing to live and untethered some office workers from their corporate headquarters, while housing costs drove people away from large cities. Over the past five years, rural counties have gained population after losing it for decades, Census Bureau data show.
But Ms. Gourley’s recruitment efforts have slowed. This past year, only one person qualified for a new incentive from the state. And three of the remote workers she welcomed moved away.
“Easy come, easy go,” she said.
Incentives typically don’t change a town’s trajectory on their own. Cash does not solve the fundamental challenges that sap rural populations in the first place: a lack of well-paid jobs, decent housing and amenities that are plentiful in more populous places.
But the latest incentives do reflect a desire among small towns to hang on to the people who keep them alive and attract more, as demographic forces make growth harder to find. Paired with investments in local quality of life, they send a signal that residents want more neighbors, in hopes of sparking momentum that builds on itself.
“Communities are sitting up and taking notice to say, ‘Oh, wow, it is a competitive field,’” said James Hoelscher, an expert in rural economic development at the University of Northern Iowa. “To be competitive, we’re going to have to lean in and do things a little differently than we have in the past.”
A People Market
Relocation incentives were born in the 2010s, and generally not in rural places, or even necessarily places losing population. Rather, they were smaller cities looking to claw their way out of the Great Recession and attract a piece of the start-up boom that had enriched coastal cities in the previous decade.
Tulsa Remote, a philanthropy-funded program that in 2018 started offering $10,000 to workers with remote jobs, has attracted 4,000 people to the city. Studies have shown a high return on investment, spurring similar efforts.
After the pandemic hit, former executives at Angi, a recommendation site for contractors, saw an opportunity to expand those programs with newly mobile office workers. They started MakeMyMove, an Airbnb-like marketplace connecting people interested in moving with communities looking for residents — and saw how much local jurisdictions were willing to pay.
This year, the company estimates that 1,500 people will relocate using the platform. That is peanuts relative to the approximately 7.5 million people who moved across state lines in 2023. But Evan Hock, a founder of MakeMyMove, said it was more about enhancing the visibility of towns that might never end up on the radar of people looking for someplace new, and helping them get over the financial hump of moving.
MakeMyMove has successfully lobbied some state governments to fund these incentives. Indiana has come up with more than $7.8 million, and Wisconsin approved $5 million.
In some places, the will to continue has already expired. Vermont’s Legislature ended its five-year experiment with relocation incentives in 2023. Randy Maiers, chief executive of a community foundation for St. Clair County, Mich., started making grants in 2016 but has since tapered them off.
“You’re not moving a population needle on this program,” Mr. Maiers said. Instead of paying people to move, he is working on building public spaces that encourage community gathering. “Dump your money into a place that people want to live in — that’s where we’re seeing the needle move.”
Some places ultimately decided they did not need incentives. Northwest Arkansas, which in 2020 started offering $10,000 and a free bicycle, ended its program because the region’s behemoth employers — Walmart, Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt, the trucking company — were attracting thousands of workers on their own.
Topeka, Kan., has stuck with its program, which started in 2019, funded through a local sales tax. The city was not losing population, like rural areas farther west, but it had flatlined. The city has given out 229 checks of $5,000 to $15,000 to both Topeka natives moving home and as an employer perk for workers who relocate to the county.
Cody Foster, the founder of Advisors Excel in Topeka, which provides marketing and other services for wealth managers, has used the program to move employees who were commuting to Topeka from Kansas City. For those he recruited from other places, he said, “it’s kind of a nice cherry on top.”
The money was not decisive for Kaustav Ghose, who moved from an operations job in wealth management in Northern Virginia to a better-paid position with more responsibility at Advisors Excel. “To me, the $10,000 was an extra incentive, but I really came for the opportunity,” he said.
Communities offering cash to prospective residents have to accept that there is no way to know whether a recipient would have moved there anyway. One way to get past that is offering incentives that generate a tangible benefit for everyone else.
In Iowa, the City of Newton cuts a $10,000 check to anyone who buys a new home worth more than $240,000. City officials credit the program with spurring construction after a long drought, even though half the 132 recipients so far already lived in town.
After studying the record of relocation incentives, Detroit started a program this spring with $500,000 aimed at making 313 grants. Similar to Newton’s, the Detroit program’s money is available to current residents and newcomers.
Hilary Doe, who runs MoveDetroit, said the grants were tailored to purposes like homes and businesses that also benefited the city, rather than simply ended up in someone’s pocket.
“You can make sure the incentives are targeted toward things that have impact regardless,” Ms. Doe said.
Chickens and Eggs
Many rural Kansas counties have been shrinking since the 1970s, as oil and gas production peaked and mechanization ate up farm jobs. To generations who witnessed that inflection, success came to mean getting out.
Malorie Elliott’s father left Lincoln County in the 1980s for Texas, and she started her career as a nurse in Midland. She wanted to move back to the family’s land in Lincoln, but her grandmother insisted there was no opportunity in rural Kansas.
The pandemic changed things. Ms. Elliott’s husband could work remotely at his job in oil and gas services, and her grandmother died. So with the help of a $5,000 grant, the family moved back to Kansas and started building a house on the family land.
Ms. Elliott is the kind of person small towns are looking for: energetic, entrepreneurial and a booster for rural life. She bought the downtown fitness center that Ms. Gourley, the economic development director, had installed in a vacant former grocery store. She dreams of starting a restaurant and a clothing store on Lincoln’s sleepy main street.
“This new generation of people who are moving back to small towns, and wanting that lifestyle for their families — we have goals, we have visions,” Ms. Elliott, 32, said. “If I had even a million dollars for this town, we could do so many amazing things.”
Last year, the state set aside $3 million for relocation incentives over two years, and parceled grants across 12 local jurisdictions. Some have done well: The nearly 13,000-person town of Ottawa said it had nearly reached its goal of attracting 10 households. Salina, which boasts a stylishly retrofitted main street stacked with cafes and restaurants, is ahead of schedule on its plan to attract 20 families within two years.
But several of the smaller places have not managed to give out all the money they have for incentives, as a first-year deadline looms. Competition is stiff, and the requirements are tougher to meet than some other incentives, especially the $55,000 salary minimum, which even schoolteachers in rural areas do not always make.
Katie Vanderhoff, community development coordinator for Ottawa County, has qualified two of her three slots, including the county’s new emergency management director, who came from Fort Worth.
“We don’t have a lot of jobs in general, and not a lot that pay $55,000 or more,” Ms. Vanderhoff said. “I think that’s what’s been holding people back.”
Another barrier is housing. Ottawa offered free land for anyone who wanted to build a house but found no takers. State grants supported the construction of four homes on the lots, which existing Kansas residents snapped up.
Neodesha, a town of about 2,500 east of Wichita, has not managed to award any incentives. Chris Bauman, the town’s director of community development, said a lack of apartments stopped people who expressed interest from as far away as New York.
“To get them to relocate that kind of distance, do they want to make an investment in a home?” Mr. Bauman said. “No, they want to try us on. And that became evident, that we certainly needed the rental housing to support new movement in and out of the community.”
Mr. Bauman does think that the program brought positive publicity to Neodesha that it could never have earned on its own, and that several buildings have sold on the little main street as a result.
It is not cheap, however. Cities pay MakeMyMove whether or not someone moves through the program, because of the cost of filtering and vetting hundreds of people who express interest. According to Mr. Hock, the marketplace’s founder, pricing tops out at about $21,000 for each potential mover, not counting the incentive itself. Salina paid more than half of its $218,000 budget to the company.
Places like Neodesha are running into some tougher years ahead. A sharp reduction in immigration under the Trump administration will mean fewer people to draw upon in the future. Although small towns have better luck winning back people who grew up locally and went away for college or jobs, those “boomerang migrants” compose a sliver of the population, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
On top of that, Americans are relocating less than they used to, even after the pandemic-induced pop of migration. “The long-term trend of dramatic slowdown in the rate at which Americans move still holds,” said Kenan Fikri, a senior fellow at the Economic Innovation Group. “It just means that communities are more at the mercy of wider demographic and population trends.”
Ms. Gourley knows the obstacles. And yet she thinks Lincoln County does not have an option other than to recruit people who want what it can offer: a tightknit community and wide-open space.
“We’re competing with the world here,” she said. Along with money, her MakeMyMove program offered farm fresh eggs for a year, and volunteers — usually the local football team — to unload moving trucks. She helps new residents find friends and ways to contribute to local organizations to knit them into the community.
“I feel like the cash incentive is the click bait,” Ms. Gourley said. “It’s what gets people’s attention, but it’s what comes after the click that probably matters most.”
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