Central Pennsylvania town offers incentives for remote workers to locate there

Jason Nark reports for the Philadelphia Inquirer from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in Centre County, "Two towns in rural Pa. are giving remote workers free housing for a month, in the hopes they’ll stay longer." Here's an excerpt: 

Last month, the PA Wilds Center for Entrepreneurship launched a program called “The Wilds Are Working: A Remote Lifestyle Experience,” with the goal of luring remote workers such as Beal to rural corners of the state. Bellefonte, a town of 6,276 about 10 miles north of Penn State, and Kane, a McKean County town of 3,500 on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest, were chosen as the pilots for the program.

Rural “Zoom towns” across the country have launched similar programs, some of them giving workers $10,000 to relocate there for one year.

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The Pennsylvania Wilds is made up of a portion of Centre County and 12 other rural counties in northern Pennsylvania, west of Harrisburg. Although the region has been an outdoors destination for camping, hiking, fishing, and hunting for centuries.

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In the early months of the pandemic, when the outdoors seemed to be the only safe space, buzz about the Wilds region grew.

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Some who left the cities got a quick lesson in rural America’s biggest drawback — poor Internet service — but that’s a cause that’s gotten rare bipartisan attention from every elected state and federal official between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.