The small towns giving away thousands of dollars and incredible perks to get remote workers to move to them
Among the towns leading the charge is Noblesville, an Indianapolis suburb, which offered Ford data engineer Brandon Speece and his fiancée $5,000 to relocate.
On top of the cash bonus, Speece was given perks like free concert tickets, a membership to a shared working space and access to a golf course.
'The biggest benefit was the cash, which we just turned around and used to hire movers,' Speece told The Wall Street Journal, adding that 'the co-working space was great, and the golfing didn't hurt.'
The drive from small towns to boost their economies with work-from-home residents comes as many employers have retained out of office working hours since the pandemic.
Those who enjoy such perks have the freedom to live wherever they want, and small cities have taken notice.
Companies like MakeMyMove, a platform for worker-relocation programs, have also been created to take advantage of the demand.
MakeMyMove now has 178 programs covering hundreds of cities and towns across the United States, according to co-founder Evan Hock.
Despite post-pandemic initiatives by many large companies to bring their employees back to the office, 10 percent of the American workforce remains remote. That number has stayed relatively stable since 2023.
Noblesville runs one of the larger programs on MakeMyMove and has successfully relocated 102 remote workers since 2022, bringing it a total of 253 new residents.
The program boasts a 90 percent retention rate and is forecasted to have a $37.6 million economic impact over the next five years, according to the city.
The residents who moved with the program make an average of $80,000 in wages, while the average price of the homes they buy are around $500,000.
'In Indiana in particular — and probably across the country — you're either growing or dying as a community,' Noblesville Mayor Chris Jensen told The Journal.
With those stakes in mind, cities and towns on MakeMyMove are battling to offer the best goodies to the roughly 17 million remote workers.
Terre Haute, Indiana; Columbus, Georgia; and Whitesburg, Kentucky, are also giving out incentives worth $5,000 to $7,000.
Tulsa Remote is also among country's most established remote-worker programs and says it has gotten over 3,600 people to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, since 2018.
Seventy percent of the people who moved with Tulsa Remote since 2019 are still living in the city.
The program, funded through the George Kaiser Family Foundation, pays $10,000 to remote workers who stay for at least a year.
According to a study funded by Tulsa Remote and conducted by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the program has more than paid for itself.
The study found that each dollar spent on Tulsa Remote ended up returning $4 in local benefits, mostly through tax revenue and job creation.
It also found that the program was six times better at creating jobs than traditional business incentives.
Eastern Kentucky has its own remote worker program that hopes to replace much of the devastation that has been left after the coal industry's long decline.
LaTasha Friend manages the region's program, EKY Remote, and said she hopes to revitalize a part of the country that has fallen on hard times in recent years.
'Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, you're told if you want to be successful you need to leave the region,' she told The Journal. 'That kind of hurts my heart.'
Since launching in 2024, EKY Remote has relocated 51 households to Eastern Kentucky, which makes up over 158 people in total.
Kentucky's capital city, Frankfort, has its own remote-worker initiative that has brought five workers to live there since its launch in 2023.
The package deal includes a $5,000 cash bonus, a bourbon distillery tour and the promise of meeting the mayor.
For families looking to get out of major cities but find it difficult to move because of high interest rates or other factors, remote-worker programs can be a lifeline.
When David Wellington's Washington, D.C.-area job went remote during the pandemic, he and his wife began looking for the best incentives.
They ended up choosing Noblesville because of its affordable real estate, well-ranked schools and proximity to family members in Indiana.
The Wellingtons sold their three-bedroom townhouse in the D.C. area for $640,000 and paid just $600,000 for their new five-bedroom home in Noblesville. The couple then used the $5,000 from the city government to furnish their new place.
'I don't think we had ever imagined living in Indiana at all,' Wellington said. 'We're both coasters.'
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The Guardian
an hour ago
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The Ice alert app founder sparking fury in Trump officials: ‘Pam Bondi said I better watch out? Please.'
For many undocumented immigrants living in the US, the constant threat of Ice raids has turned their homes into prisons. Leaving the house to go to work, school, buy groceries or the doctor's office all carry unthinkable risks. It's a problem that Joshua Aaron wanted to tackle. A former indie musician (he played bass in 2000s buzz band The Rosenbergs and later fronted his own group Stealing Heather) turned app entrepreneur, he set about making an app that could spot Ice and alert people, the same way drivers let other drivers know about traffic stops on Waze. Launched without fanfare and with no intention of profit in April 2025, IceBlock offers real-time alerts about the presence of agents – while, Aaron claims, fiercely guarding the anonymity of its users. Within two months, the app had soared on the charts in Apple's app store – prompting the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to attack the app and its founder, claiming they were 'obstructing justice'. She claimed she wanted to work with the Department of Justice to try to prosecute CNN for reporting on the app. Noem's intervention ensured the app topped the charts for a number of days (although it has since fallen out of the top 100). Then last month Aaron's wife, Carolyn Feinstein, was fired from her Department of Justice job in Austin, Texas. The couple believe it was clear 'retaliation' for the app, despite Feinstein not being involved in the app's creation or promotion. Aaron is an unlikely figure in this space – he has a brash, rock'n'roll demeanor and not much experience in immigration activism. His background has led to some questions about how well the app protects its users, especially as it asks you to keep your location data on at all times. But a number of independent investigations have shown he is managing to keep users anonymous. Aaron spoke with the Guardian a week after his wife's firing. First of all, what happened to your wife? Why was she fired? They fired her as retribution against me. They can't do shit to me. I'm not going to be afraid. So they fired her. Were they explicit in in why they were firing her? No, that's the crazy part, in her termination letter, she got accused of lack of candor but they didn't mention the app. But the Department of Justice responded to every journalist that reached out in, like, five minutes. They had a prepared statement for an auditor in Austin? In the US trustee department? They have nothing to do with immigration. They have nothing to do with anything else with the DoJ, they're a whole separate division that handles bankruptcy. What did they say? They had this prepared statement, they accused her of threatening law enforcement officers and endangering the lives of Ice agents and all this horrible shit. It was very different from her termination letter. The whole thing started when Laura Loomer doxed her on X and then said that she spoke to Tom Homan. Homan goes on Newsmax and says that he spoke to the DoJ, which obviously is [headed by] Pam Bondi. Twenty-four hours later, my wife gets a termination letter from the deputy director of the DoJ. It was pretty obvious that it went from Loomer to Homan and to Bondi to 'You're fired.' That was it. [A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said they discovered his wife, Feinstein, has a sizable interest in All U Chart Inc, the company that holds the IP for IceBlock. In a statement, they said: 'ICEBlock is an app that illegal aliens use to evade capture while endangering the lives of ICE officers by disclosing their location. This DOJ will not tolerate threats against law enforcement officers.' Aaron acknowledged that his wife always owns a 20% share in any company he starts. He describes this as a security precaution: if something were to happen to him, Feinstein would have the legal ability to take over the company without complications. He says she had no involvement in the development or operation of the IceBlock app.] It must be tough for your family. She worked there for almost a decade. She has decades of experience in the private sector, and she's really, really good at what she does, and was honestly beloved by everyone she worked with. They just basically fired her and accused her of all this horrible stuff, and none of it's true. It really, really sucks. She misses it terribly. Are you worried about other ways the Trump administration might retaliate? Well, you have Pam Bondi accusing me and saying, I better 'watch out.' Please, come on. I better watch out? Why? I'm protected under the first amendment. This is perfectly legal, and I made sure of that – I checked with multiple constitutional attorneys and criminal attorneys before I released this app, because I was concerned about whether I'm protected. And everyone agreed 100% this is protected speech. Can you explain briefly how IceBlock works? Well it can only be downloaded from the US app store, and people can only report sightings within a five-mile radius of where they are currently. Then all sightings get deleted after four hours. So let's say there are 100 people in a five-mile area, and one person sees Ice – they're walking down the street, whatever – and they go, 'Oh, shit.' And they report it. All the other users in that five-mile radius get an immediate notification that shows up on their phone. The app has been live for quite a few months. Do you get the sense it's actually being used to by people who are worried about Ice? I have no idea, because it's 100% anonymous. We don't track those metrics. I get asked all the time: 'Where are most of your users?' I have no fucking idea. 'How many sightings do you get per hour?' I don't know. We don't track this. It's so hard to answer these basic questions that normal apps would be able to answer because there is the whole core principle of anonymity. We don't have that data, and I don't want it. The only thing I can tell you is that currently on the app we have 445 sightings nationwide [likely over a four-hour window due to the fact that sightings stay up for four hours once reported] and we have just about 1 million users that have this installed on their phones right now. But is it being downloaded by well-meaning liberals who support what you're doing? Or is it doing its practical job and helping undocumented people as a practical tool in their lives? Maybe we just can't know that yet? I would say this, most people who download the app are doing it to keep themselves safe, so they want to know what's going on around their five-mile radius. So yes, I think it's very much being used for how it's intended to be used. I didn't want to have to build this, but it is a necessity. It is a tool as this early warning system that does keep people safe, and it is, I think, giving people peace of mind, especially those who are most affected by it or most at risk. It allows them to go to that restaurant or walk around that neighborhood with a little bit of peace of mind. What were the initial fears and challenges? Did you worry about whether the Apple app store was going to allow it on? How confident was I I could do it? I don't want to sound egotistical – and don't print this so I sound like a fucking asshole – but, dude, I can fucking do it. Of course, I could do it. Even with my music career, I built audio studios, and I was a producer and a mix engineer, and I designed gear. So I've always kind of been on that tech engineering side of things like, that's just how my brain works. And I've been coding a healthcare app for the past four and a half years. So as far as could I write the code? Could I make it happen? This is a crazy easy app. Would it be approved by Apple? That was an interesting one, because nothing like it has ever been done before. When I brought it to Apple and I submitted it to the app store, it got pushed back, and it took three weeks of going back and forth with Apple's legal department and higher-ups in Apple's app review, and there were conversations almost on a daily basis with senior people there saying: 'Is this even legal? Can we do this? Are we going to get in trouble for having this?' Apple had a hard time wrapping their head around it, because they were like, 'What do you mean you're never going to make money? What do you mean you're never going to track anything?' I was like, 'Yeah, that's the point. I don't care.' I don't care about people's data as far as, like, being able to get analytics or track them or sell their data. I don't care about any of that. I care about keeping people safe. That is literally the whole point. Eventually they allowed it on. Because there are no user accounts, and no way of you seeing what's happening on the app, there's no way to block bad actors. Does that mean there is a possibility of people reporting false sightings? I can't verify the sightings without driving to rural Indiana and seeing if they're there. I've put in safeguards: you can only report a sighting once every five minutes so you can't just spam the database; all sightings are deleted after four hours; it has to be a real address – you can't type in 123 Main Street; and you can only report within your own five-mile radius. So with all of those safeguards – are there any false sightings? Yes, of course there are. Are they prevalent? No, because it would be too time-consuming. And what's the worst-case scenario for a false sighting anyway? That a user gets a notification on their device and says: 'Hey, I'll stay away from that address for a couple hours?' Who gives a shit. So beyond helping people – what's your personal interest in developing these apps? You're also working on a healthcare app, which is also focused on keeping patient data private. Yes, my whole thing is very, very privacy-focused. I don't use Gmail. I run my own mail servers. I run my own web servers. I have always done that because I just don't trust these companies who are reading all of your messages, and they're doing it to harvest your data and market to you. I want myself to be private. I'm an individual. I think that lent quite a bit to the way that I thought about IceBlock. I've had my IceBlock open while we've been on the phone, and there's been one reported sighting in my area. Yeah, isn't that nice to know that? I mean, you're British right, obviously you are not a native-born American. So now you know maybe don't go over in that area for the next couple hours. Not a big deal. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity This article was 13 August 2025; a previous version incorrectly said that Carolyn Feinstein was arrested, not fired.
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