More than 100 companies have come to Oklahoma in the last five years, including 6 company HQ's, and another 200 have announced expansions, resulting in more than $10 billion in promised new investments. Oklahoma Wants to Be the 'Next Texas.' Imagine That:
People watch a jazz concert at LowDown in the Arts District neighborhood of Tulsa, Okla. on Feb. 24, 2023.
Since 2018, Tulsa has been offering remote workers $10,000 to move to the city for at least a year. In its first year, 70 people took the city up on the offer. In 2021, 950 people made the move. Many stayed. But Oklahoma City is now one of the country’s fastest-growing large cities, climbing past Boston and Washington to become the 20th largest by population, with 687,000 people. Still, the state’s growth has been dwarfed by the roaring boom in Texas, which has welcomed a rush of transplants from other states and new immigrants from around the world. The Texas economy is second in the United States only to California, and it has been growing faster.
The rivalry with Texas nonetheless remains a bit one-sided. Oklahoma has three Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the state, all in the oil and gas industry; Texas has more than 50. Asked about the threat posed by their neighbor, Texas officials did not see one. Don Ward, a Texas native and entrepreneur, is moving his small technology business, Laundris, to Tulsa from Austin. Ward, 53, said he worried about the rapid rise of housing and other costs, and Tulsa offered some of the small-city feel that he said had been vanishing from Austin, whose population is now just under 1 million.
Seated in his office in the Capitol, Stitt conceded that Texas has long had a reputation as a good place for business. “But it’s getting overcrowded,” he said, noting that commute times around Oklahoma City are far shorter than those in Dallas-Fort Worth. The city has also been transforming politically. Once reliably red, Oklahoma City is now solidly purple, having narrowly favored former President Donald Trump in 2020 but voting by a wide margin for the losing Democratic candidate for governor last year.
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