SPOKANE, Wash. — The “great migration” got a head start here.
Long before the rise of remote work spurred many tech workers to move to more affordable and livable parts of the country, Spokane started to see a trickle of people and companies from Seattle, seeking lower costs and a new lifestyle. GeekWire documented the phenomenon back in 2019.
The pandemic opened the spigot, bringing a population inflow from around the country that has made some tech companies in the Spokane area more optimistic about their prospects for tapping into a larger pool of local talent.
Some entrepreneurs who originally moved to Spokane in the interest of their families and the way of life are now building their startups here, optimistic about hiring employees from the region.
Startup community leaders see an opportunity to bring employees and executives who are working remotely in Spokane into the fold of the local tech ecosystem.
“There’s been a ton of people who have contacted us to get connected,” said Bill Kalivas of LaunchPad Inland Northwest, a group working to connect and expand the region’s innovation community. “You have so many people working from home who don’t want to feel isolated. They want to plug in. It’s really been remarkable.”
Kalivas is a remote worker himself, a Google Cloud sales executive who revived the LaunchPad organization as part of the tech giant’s 20% initiative. The group runs a variety of events and programs for the tech, business, and startup community, including mentorship and networking.
There are downsides to the influx, as well. In particular, the growing population has started to chip away at the affordability advantage that drew many people to Spokane in the first place.
Meanwhile, the rise of remote work means companies in the region can more easily employ people around the country or the world. That’s a mixed bag for a place like Spokane, expanding the options for startups seeking to grow, but creating a more dispersed workforce with looser connections to the local community.
At the same time, connecting with people working remotely in Spokane can be hit and miss, said Megan Hulsey, a Spokane-based vice president and business lender with Craft3, a nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution.
In some cases, those workers prefer to fly under the radar, so as not to jeopardize their ability to work remotely. Hulsey cited efforts by groups including Ignite Northwest to identify and engage with people working remotely in the region.
“I think that’s an opportunity for us,” she said. “But finding them is hard.”
In all of these ways, Spokane is a case study in the impact of remote work and migration outside the nation’s largest tech hubs, as we’ve found in our reporting for this special series on the tech community and economy in Spokane and the larger region of the Inland Northwest.
Spokane’s population influx
In raw numbers, Spokane County grew by 7% from 2018 to 2023, to a population of 551,000 as of last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The county is the fourth-largest in Washington state, and the city of Spokane (population 230,000) is the second-largest in the state behind Seattle (population 750,000).
“This thing where people were leaving big cities and coming to small cities in the last three years has definitely hit Spokane like a wave,” said venture capitalist Martin Tobias of Incisive Ventures, the longtime Seattle investor, entrepreneur, and technology executive. “I can’t tell you how many Microsoft people, or people from other big cities, have moved here just for the quality of life.”
Tobias is one. He and his wife moved to Spokane at the onset of the pandemic, in part to escape the lockdown mindset in Seattle and Los Angeles at the time.
“We thought maybe Spokane would be a little more free, and it is,” he said.
Tobias invests in business-to-business software companies all over the world, and didn’t intend to fund Spokane-area startups. However, he was surprised by the welcoming nature of the Spokane investor community.
Tobias has backed three Spokane startups so far — including the first company he met after moving to the region, Vega Cloud, which he believes will be among his most successful investments overall.
Another major upside of moving to Spokane, Tobias said, was the ability to buy a home three times as big for one-third the price of a home in Seattle.
Spokane’s leaders have long cited the relatively low cost of living as a key selling point, along with a supportive and constructive business and investment community, easy access to outdoor recreation, and minimal traffic.
This traditional strength of affordability has been put at risk in recent years.
- Spokane County’s cost of living is 11% higher than the current U.S. average, according to the Spokane Workforce Council. As recently as 2020, it was less than 1 point above the nation.
- Spokane remains far more affordable than King County — home to Microsoft and Amazon, and the tech hubs of Seattle and Bellevue — where the cost of living exceeds the U.S. average by nearly 35%.
- However, wages in the Spokane area haven’t kept up with the cost of living. The average annual wage in Spokane County is about $61,000, about $9,000 less than the national average.
“The cost of living is really being driven by the housing market. We’ve had population growth, but not enough housing being built,” said Mike McBride, Spokane Workforce Council business and industry analyst. “Of course, that’s not a Spokane-specific thing. It’s anywhere in the country that’s growing. But we’ve acutely felt it.”
The median selling price for homes in Spokane County in February was $415,000, up 6.7% over the past year, and slightly higher than the national median of $411,887 for the same month, according to Redfin data. By comparison, Spokane County’s median selling price was in the mid-$200,000s five years ago.
The city is seeking to address the affordability issue in part by encouraging new forms of housing. Spokane is emerging as a leader in the state by updating its development code to accommodate fourplexes and other forms of “middle housing.”
Lisa Brown, the former state legislator, educator, and past Washington state Commerce Department director who took office as Spokane’s mayor in January, cited housing affordability a central issue for the region and her administration.
“We’re working hard on that one,” Brown said in an interview with GeekWire, describing affordable housing as one of the keys to keeping recent university graduates in Spokane, and making the city viable for young families.
One of the entrepreneurs who has moved to the region in recent years is Joy Tang, CEO of Markable.AI, which makes technology to help social media creators and influencers automate and streamline their workflows.
Tang relocated three years ago from the Bay Area due to her husband’s work.
In some ways, she said, she sees Spokane almost as an extension of the Seattle tech market, particularly after talent was able to migrate across the state during the pandemic. Markable’s team includes people in Spokane, Seattle, the Bay Area and China. While the talent pool may be larger in Seattle, she said, there are benefits to hiring in Spokane.
“The positive is that it’s a smaller circle here,” Tang said. “You can quickly find the right talent, and find out their history, because it’s such as small town — everybody knows everything.”
With the population influx, there has been a 13% increase in information technology jobs in Spokane County between 2018 and 2023, according to data from the Spokane Workforce Council.
However, IT jobs remain a small part of the overall workforce, less than 3% of employment. That leaves remote tech workers with a scarcity of local employment options if they lose or leave their jobs.
And for startups, remote hiring only goes so far. Some Spokane startup leaders say it’s especially difficult to compete for specialized talent like cloud and AI engineers who are critical to many of today’s tech innovations.
Signs pointed to Spokane
Some of Spokane’s newcomers are among the most optimistic about its future.
Startup entrepreneur and software engineer Mark Harrell and his family moved to Spokane from Austin about a year-and-a half ago. He grew up in Panama as a military kid, and lived in other cities including Pittsburgh, Tucson, and Bellingham, where he met his wife.
He wanted his sons to grow up building forts, hunting, fishing, skiing, and participating in other outdoors activities, in addition to watching great basketball.
Austin ultimately didn’t meet their criteria, and they’d grown weary of the weather in Western Washington. They filtered through “a big, long list” of options, as he recalled, and landed on Spokane as the ideal location.
Harrell brought not just his family but also his startup with him. Chapterly, founded in 2021, offers tools for authors to design, plan, research and write, and then export and publish on their platform of choice. Flying mostly under the radar in the industry so far, it has amassed a user base of more than 2,700 authors.
Chapterly has three full-time engineers, working remotely, in addition to a contract support team. But as he grows the company, Harrell said he is increasingly optimistic about hiring in Spokane — much to his own surprise.
“When I moved here, it wasn’t because I had done a ton of research on the startup community here, or some of the engineering talent that is here. But it seems like that is thriving,” he said, citing as one example the packed crowd at the Ignite 25+5 Awards, which he attended in February in downtown Spokane.
The early mover
One of the trendsetters in the migration was Craig Tadlock, CEO of GoToTags, an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) hardware and software solutions provider. The startup moved in 2019 from Seattle to Spokane, where he grew up. His main motivation for making the move was a quest for cheaper space, due to skyrocketing office rental rates in the Seattle area.
Tadlock was featured in that GeekWire story about Spokane five years ago. We caught up with him on a recent visit to Spokane, at GoToTag’s office in the Kendall Yards neighborhood, just across the Spokane River from downtown.
Sure enough, the company’s lease rate is about one-third the price per square foot compared with what it would have paid for a new lease in Seattle if it had stayed five years ago.
GoToTags has 10 employees in Spokane. Two people moved with the company from Seattle, and both are still there. The nature of its business, involving hardware and software, requires in-person work for the most part, and makes remote hiring tough. Tadlock rebuilt the rest of the team by recruiting from the Spokane area.
The best part about the move? “The people,” he said. “They’re there to work. There’s no ego.”
In another way, people represent the biggest disappointment, he said. There’s not enough of them. One factor, he believes, is the strong loyalty displayed by workers in the Spokane area. That’s part of what makes people in Spokane such great employees, he said. But it also means labor market isn’t as fluid as it could be.
“The pool of candidates is smaller,” he said. “It’s a double-edged sword.”
Tadlock’s perspective is informed in part by the fact that he grew up in Spokane. He also worked as an early employee at HomeGrocer in the Seattle region, starting in the late 1990s, during the heyday of the dotcom boom.
Because Spokane hasn’t yet seen its companies take off and soar to the degree some have in major tech hubs, Tadlock said, it can be tougher to attract local employees using incentives like stock options to sweeten the offer.
The influx of tech workers from Seattle and elsewhere during the pandemic was a mixed blessing. Many of them brought their higher salaries with them, Tadlock said, making it tougher for employers in the Spokane area to meet their compensation expectations, even after some lost their remote jobs due to industry cutbacks.
GoToTags works with technologies including Near Field Communication (NFC), Ultra-High Frequency RFID, and barcodes. The sector is expanding rapidly due in part to the supplier inventory tracking requirements that Walmart and other companies are adopting. GoToTags is profitable, funded by revenue, he said.
Five years later, was moving to Spokane the right call? Yes, Tadlock said.
“It’s different,” he said, “but overall, for the type of business that we are, I feel like it’s a better place.”
