Michael Rickaby wanted to move from Connecticut to somewhere in the Midwest. And he wanted to get paid for doing it.
The 43-year-old East Coast native started working remotely as a call-center representative for a mortgage company during the pandemic and discovered he loved the new work-from-home lifestyle. Now, Rickaby wanted to take advantage of his newfound freedom to live wherever he should choose.
A quick online search revealed that many towns and communities all around the Midwest were paying remote workers just like him to come there.
“Once I found out how many towns were offering the incentives, that became a deciding factor for me,” Rickaby said. “I was going to move to a place that offered me money.”
The City of Jasper was one of the communities happy to oblige, offering him $5,000 and a handful of other perks to sweeten the pot.
The incentives worked. In April, Rickaby picked up and moved halfway across the country to start a new life in Jasper. Now, after a year in the community, he considers the city of 16,700 people in Dubois County his home. He plans to buy a house there.
“There was a lot of communication back and forth before I moved, so it felt very personal,” he said. “They really wanted me here, which was nice.”
The city offered the incentive money through MakeMyMove, an Indianapolis-based company which began operations during the pandemic as a tool to connect remote workers like Rickaby to Indiana communities.
As the pandemic winds down, interest in the company has grown. That’s because remote work, which began as an untested experiment to handle COVID, has in less than three years baked itself into the modern workforce.
Before the pandemic in 2019, just under 6% of Americans worked remotely, totaling about 5 million people. That number climbed to 60 million during the outbreak. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce anticipates about 40 million of those will continue to work remotely.
The numbers are already in for 2022, when 35% of job holders had the option to work from home full-time while another 23% had a part-time option, according to a survey by McKinsey and Company. That adds up to 58% of the entire American labor force having latitude to work remotely at least some of the time.
Evan Hock, co-founder of MakeMyMove, said it’s hard to overstate the impact remote work is having on the economy. The way he sees it, the change is one of the biggest societal shifts since the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s.
“That’s not hyperbole,” Hock said. “For 100 years, people have migrated out of the middle of the country towards the big city centers because they had to go to those places for work. Well, now they’re free to choose where they live and work independent of their employer. They’re voting with their feet.”
That societal shift isn’t lost on Indiana’s cities and towns. Two dozen are using MakeMyMove to entice the nation’s rapidly growing supply of remote workers to their community. In just three months, 189 households totaling 451 people have moved or committed to move to Indiana through the program.
From an investment perspective, offering cash to those workers makes a lot of sense, Hock argued. A person making $100,000 who brings that salary to an Indiana town will end up generating $83,000 a year in economic impact there, according to an economist consulted by MakeMyMove.
Now, state agencies are incentivizing remote workers to choose Indiana as their new work-from-home state and embracing a new economic development strategy to fit the 21st century labor market.
A ‘100% BUY IN’
The City of New Haven signed up to use MakeMyMove in January. Less than 48 hours after their incentive package went live on the website, two remote workers had reached out about moving to the community of 15,700 bordering Fort Wayne.
But New Haven officials took their push to attract remote workers a step further.
In January, the city became one of the first in Indiana to take advantage of a new state program allowing cities, towns and counties to establish a workforce retention and recruitment program. The program enables communities to create a special fund dedicated to marketing their community or offering incentives to those who relocate there.
New Haven seeded its workforce fund with $50,000 in economic development income taxes, which was matched by the Indiana Economic Development Corp.
The state agency has allocated $3 million to match funding put up by Indiana communities focused on attracting remote workers, according to Erin Sweitzer, vice president of strategic external communications for the corporation.
Now, New Haven is using the money to offer remote workers a $5,000 incentive payout through MakeMyMove and funding other marketing initiatives that aim to put the city on remote workers’ radar, said New Haven Chief of Staff Elizabeth Hoffman.
The senate bill creating the workforce program originally included language that would have required the IEDC to award grants up to $15,000 to workers who relocate to Indiana but work for an out-of-state company. That provision was cut by the House Ways and Means committee.
Still, the state economic development agency signing on to help fund local initiatives to attract remote workers demonstrates a state-level commitment to those efforts, noted Adam Berry, vice president of economic development for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.
“We’re seeing a 100% buy in by the IEDC,” he said.
INDIANA GETS ‘READI’
Peru’s revitalizing of a 40-acre district along the Wabash River. A new downtown park in Loogootee. A nearly 250-acre sports and recreation complex in Valparaiso.
Those are just some of the dozens of projects funded by the state’s READI grant program, which in 2021 provided $500 million to cities and towns across the state to pursue a slew of economic-development projects both large and small.
In rural communities such as Peru and Loogootee, the money was often earmarked for quality-of-life initiatives such as parks and trails. Such projects are paramount to attracting remote workers to rural areas of the state, according to Denny Spinner, director of the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs.
That’s truer than ever following the COVID outbreak. The importance of quality-of-life aspects of a community increased three to four times for potential residents compared to before the pandemic, according to a study published in September by Ball State’s Center for Business and Economic Research.
“The return on investment and the vitality that comes along with quality-of-place initiatives is pretty evident,” Spinner said.
Now, state legislators have approved the allocation of another $500 million through the READI program to continue boosting rural and urban economies.
But the impact could be dampened by a new law that cuts Hoosier property taxes, according to Matt Greller, CEO of Accelerate Indiana Municipalities, an association of more than 460 local government units.
House Bill 1499 reduces tax bills through an increase to a supplemental deduction that’s currently set to a flat 25%. Homeowners with properties worth less than $600,00 will see assessed value deductions of 35% for taxes this year, then 40% for 2024; 37.5% in 2025; and 35% after that.
Indiana lawmakers also advanced a bill to study in part the possibility of ending the state income tax altogether.
With inflation already causing financial pain in many communities, further cutting tax revenue could kill the quality-of-life push cities and towns are making to attract remote workers, Greller argued.
“I think we have to be careful not to stymie any of that momentum by limiting or eroding their fiscal assets,” he said. “If we look at limiting or reducing the amount of property tax revenue with no replacement, that could be an issue going forward.”
RALLYING AROUND REMOTE
For decades, cities and towns have lured companies and business to their communities through tax abatements, special credits and a slew of other tax-payer-funded incentives.
It’s time to offer similar perks to remote workers looking to move to Indiana who bring their jobs and a surge of economic activity with them, argued MakeMyMove co-founder Hock.
“I think we’re coming out into the marketplace to say ‘Hey, the economics of remote worker recruitment are just as, if not more, strong than business recruitment,’” he said.
Cities in other states have embraced this approach. Since 2018, Tulsa, Oklahoma, has offered $10,000 to remote workers and “digital nomads” to move there. Last year, more than 22,000 people applied to the program, and 2,000 have actually taken Tulsa up on its offer since the program began.
Indiana is quickly gaining a reputation as an attractive place for work-from-home residents because of its low cost of living and easy access to city amenities. In fact, the Wall Street Journal in February put Evansville, Lafayette and Fort Wayne on its Top 10 places in America to work remotely.
State officials are scrambling to capitalize on the shift through recent legislation like the workforce retention program, according to Hock. Now, he’s keeping close tabs on how lawmakers promote Indiana as a work-from-home hotbed to the nation’s expanding remote labor force.
“We consider Indiana a leader in this space,” Hock said. “It’s been really fun to watch the degree to which the state has already rallied around this idea. It really comes down to establishing a sustainable economic model.”
Rickaby, who moved from Connecticut to Jasper through MakeMyMove, agrees. With so many U.S. communities now offering incentives, Indiana risks losing remote workers like him unless it beefs up support for communities offering economic perks.
“The money I received helped pay for the move here,” he said. “It helped me get set up and bought me a washer and dryer once I got here. It just felt like I was in control of the process.”