Tulsa Remote has done real good for this city. It's brought thousands of people here and pumped hundreds of millions back into the local economy. But it's also a distraction from the more interesting question: why did we need an incentive to make the case for Tulsa in the first place? That's not really a marketing question. It's a culture question, and it's one no relocation check is going to answer.
And the model for answering it isn't a coastal boomtown Tulsa will never resemble. It's three mid-size cities that started in a similar spot: written off, a little rough around the edges, unsure of their own case. Oklahoma City taxed itself to rebuild its own downtown. Chattanooga turned around from being called America's most polluted city into a name other mid-size mayors now study. Greenville, South Carolina took a dying textile-mill downtown and built one of the most cited Main Street turnarounds in the country. None of them did it with a check written to outsiders. They did it with a long list of specific, repeatable decisions. Here's what that list looks like when you get practical about it.
Old Tulsa time built a reputation, fair or not, for "we'll get to it." Slow callbacks. Vague timelines. Deadlines treated as suggestions. None of that is charm, it's friction, and friction is exactly what a city can't afford when it's trying to convince people it's serious about growth.
New Tulsa time means businesses, contractors, and city departments alike treating reliability as the baseline, not the differentiator. Answer the phone. Quote the honest timeline. Hit it. Multiply that standard across enough local businesses and you've changed what it feels like to do business here, which is exactly the kind of thing that gets repeated in rooms Tulsa isn't in yet.
Oklahoma City didn't wait for downtown to embarrass itself into action. In 1993, the city passed a temporary penny sales tax dedicated entirely to a slate of downtown projects: a new arena, a ballpark, the Bricktown Canal, a rebuilt library. It wasn't glamorous and it wasn't fast, but it was funded on purpose, years before the payoff was visible, and the program is now widely credited as the thing that "changed everything" for the city. Oklahoma City has since run three more rounds of the same tax, on the same logic: fund the ambition before the need becomes an emergency.
That logic scales down, too. Every property owner, facility manager, and small business owner in Tulsa makes the same choice on a smaller scale every budget cycle: wait for the building to look tired and then scramble, or treat upkeep as a planned line item instead of an afterthought. A city that budgets for ambition instead of reacting to decline is just a few thousand individual buildings making that same decision at once.
In the 1970s, Greenville, South Carolina had a fading textile-town Main Street and a fashionable idea sitting in front of it: tear it down, build a mall, chase the suburbs like everyone else was doing. City leaders said no. They redesigned Main Street around people instead of parking, kept it a real street instead of a dead one, and spent the next two decades pairing public investment with private developers willing to bet alongside them. The result is now studied nationally as a model for how a mid-sized downtown competes for talent and tourism: Falls Park, the Liberty Bridge, a walkable core that out-punches cities three times its size.
Every "we've never done it that way here" is old Tulsa time protecting comfort instead of building a future. Redefining Tulsa time practically means city boards, neighborhood associations, and residents getting more comfortable saying yes to the project that feels disruptive in the moment and looks obvious in hindsight ten years later.
Listen to how Tulsans talk about Tulsa. A lot of it is hedged: "not bad for Oklahoma," "better than it used to be," "at least we're not [insert nearby city]." That's a city bracing for disappointment, not one building toward something.
Chattanooga had a genuinely worse starting point than Tulsa does now; a 1969 federal study named it the most polluted city in the country, and it lost roughly a fifth of its population over the following two decades. Instead of quietly hoping people would stop noticing, the city built a waterfront, then built the country's first citywide gigabit internet network, then leaned all the way into calling itself "Gig City" before the nickname was fully earned. The story got told so often it became true. That's the part Tulsa keeps skipping: local leaders are already doing the work of finding what makes this city genuinely worth investing in, the harder part is saying it with confidence before an outsider says it for us.
Every one of these shifts is something Tulsa can start doing this week, without waiting on a grant program, a new initiative, or outside validation. Answer the phone faster. Fund the upkeep before someone complains about it. Say yes to the project that changes the skyline. Stop apologizing for ambition in casual conversation.
Redefining Tulsa time was never going to happen with a slogan. It happens the same way Oklahoma City, Chattanooga, and Greenville built theirs: one repeated, unglamorous decision at a time, until it's just how the city operates.
About the Author:
Trey is the General Manager at Squeegee Squad Tulsa, where he oversees commercial exterior maintenance operations, client relations, and field safety protocols across the greater Tulsa area. With a hands-on approach to facility window cleaning, Trey specializes in helping property managers, healthcare administrators, and commercial building owners design proactive, high-ROI maintenance schedules that protect asset value and curb appeal.
Tags: Tulsa Oklahoma, Urban Development, Economic Development, Tulsa Remote, City Growth, Civic Leadership, Local Economy, Downtown Revitalization, Oklahoma City, Greenville SC, Chattanooga, Urban Planning, Commercial Real Estate, Building Culture, Redefining Tulsa Time, Mid-Size City Growth, Facility Maintenance, Investing in Tulsa, City Ambition