Pay People to Move to Your State or Region? Maybe It’s Not Such a Bad Idea.
September 18, 2023
What public policies have you changed your mind about over time? For me, one of them is relocation incentives for people who work at home.
About five years ago I received an invitation to check out a program being run by the state of Vermont to pay people $10,000 to move to the Green Mountain State. If you haven’t been there, Vermont is pretty awesome. But pre-pandemic it was a demographically stagnant place. State leaders wanted to try to generate some buzz around their state to get people to take a look and see how nice it was. While this made some sense, something about the idea of paying people to move to your state seemed off to me. Candidly, I thought it sounded a bit desperate.