I was paid to move to another state; Helped me afford a house

Althea McBride’s Georgia home is an “afro boho” oasis.

The walls of her living room and hallway are painted black, acting as a dramatic backdrop for her many African sculptures and artwork. The burnt orange walls of the dining room are decorated with vinyl records like Aretha Franklin’s “Knew You Were Waiting: The Best Of Aretha Franklin 1980-1998” or Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX.”

It’s been a year since McBride bought her house, and aside from a few hiccups, like a wasp infestation and disputes over property lines, everything looks exactly as she imagined — literally.

“I used Canva to help me design part of it before I even moved into the house, just by looking online at the photos they had on Zillow,” McBride told Business Insider. “I was able to download them and remodel it the way I wanted, so my living room is exactly how I imagined it.”

What she couldn’t imagine years ago was owning a home. Growing up in Los Angeles, homeownership wasn’t something she thought was possible at age 34 — and if she stayed in Los Angeles, it still might not be the case.

A financial incentive to move from California to Georgia helped McBride, now 35, decide to leave Los Angeles — although it didn’t take much convincing. She was tired of the hectic lifestyle and slow traffic of the big city and was looking for a way out.

McBride applied to a remote worker incentive program offered by Columbus, Georgia, a city in the western state bordering Alabama. She received $5,000 in cash, along with a range of other perks like a one-year membership to the Columbus Aquatics Center and coffee with the mayor.

Getting some extra money to move to a smaller town with a lower cost of living allowed McBride to become a first-time homeowner. She likes to decorate and live in her own house, and became accustomed to Southern culture and the region’s slower pace of life.

After following the ups and downs of McBride’s move in a series of interviews during her first year in Columbus, she told me that overall she was happy with her decision.

“I don’t really miss California — not yet,” she said.

Finally owner

McBride didn’t expect to become a homeowner in his 30s. “I had the typical millennial experience: I went to college, had high student debt, and then had back-to-back layoffs. I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’

At the time, she was working as a senior paid search manager for a marketing agency and living in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles — a neighborhood one exit from where the Kardashians live — and paying $3,400 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.

McBride didn’t need to know all the intricacies of buying a home to quickly realize that it would have been difficult to make it work in Woodland Hills, where the median sales price was about $1.2 million as of August 2024. She nevertheless tried to save money for a down payment to buy in California, but it wasn’t enough — and she didn’t qualify for much help because her salary was too high. So she started looking for places to live outside of California, like upstate New York and Virginia.

Although McBride graduated from Spelman College in nearby Atlanta and has family in Columbus, Ga., the small city of about 207,000 was never on her radar as a place to live.

“I was talking to my little cousin, DJ, and he kept saying, ‘You should come to Columbus, cousin,'” McBride said. “I’m like, ‘What am I going to do in Columbus?'”

It wasn’t until she saw the incentive program go viral on social media that she thought about it.

“I looked at it and I was like, ‘Well, that’s perfect,’” McBride said. “If that’s meant to be the case, I’ll apply and get a response from them – and that’s exactly what I did.”

It was March 2024. In May of that year, she learned she had been accepted into the program. In August 2024, she purchased a three-bedroom house for $175,000. Today, McBride’s mortgage costs her about $1,500 a month, less than half her rent in Los Angeles.

The benefits of living in Columbus aren’t just financial. Her home has more space so she can enjoy her hobbies, including growing her own food. In California, McBride successfully grew produce on his patio using storage bins with holes in the bottom for drainage. However, if she ever wanted to expand her business, she would need more space and a bigger budget.

“In California, you have to have money. Houses cost over $500,000, but you don’t have the land. You don’t get the land like that. So that makes it a little difficult.”

McBride never dreamed of having a greenhouse, much less a place to put it. But in Georgia, she plans to build one on her property. She already grows lettuce, blueberries, bananas, red and white onions, peppers and eggplants, and hopes to plant even more.

If she has to put in a little elbow grease to make the house and yard her own, so be it.

“I came in with the intention of having to work in a house,” McBride said. “I might have to go in with a hammer. I might have to go in with paint and fix it the way I want, but at least I have this.”

Settling into small town life

During the first months after his move, McBride frequently traveled to Atlanta – a nearly two-hour drive from Columbus – and used it as a crutch for his social activities and shopping. (Her closest Trader Joe’s, she noted, is in Atlanta). Although she still travels to Atlanta occasionally, now that she’s established her community in Columbus, she’s found more things to do closer to home. She joined the River Valley Urban League as well as the Columbus chapter of the National Council of Negro Women.

“I’ve been to all the community service events. We’ve gone to different galas. We’ve been to all kinds of things here in Columbus,” she said. “Whenever I meet someone randomly, they either know my family, or they all go to the same churches, or they grew up together. Everyone knows each other or knows someone, which is very helpful when trying to get to know people here.”

According to McBride, that $5,000 cash incentive wasn’t what convinced her to drive 2,000 miles across the country, although it was a nice sweetener that helped cover her closing costs and moving expenses. It was more the program’s promise of community-building activities and opportunities that helped ease the social burden of moving to a new city.

“For me, the financial incentive is the reimbursement, it’s like icing on the cake,” McBride said. “With this, you’re not just moving. Now it’s like there are activities that I can look forward to, there are things where I can go there and just meet completely different people with different backgrounds and really get a head start on my personal Columbus community.”

She attended events sponsored by the program, such as dinners with other program members and coffee with the mayor, BH “Skip” Henderson III, who charted a vision of what Columbus could look like in the future.

Now, McBride said she sees herself in that vision.

“I’m happy with my decision,” she said. “My goal is to stay here at least a few years.”