I lived in 2 big cities before moving back to my hometown. I can finally afford a home — and I got paid $5,000 to do it.

A 32-year-old software developer lived in Nashville and Atlanta before moving to a smaller city near family that pays remote workers to move there.

• Will Bishop moved from Atlanta back to his hometown of Columbus, Georgia, on the Alabama border.
• He was having trouble finding an affordable home to buy and decided it was time to live near family.
• The 32-year-old software developer also got $5,000 from a new Move to Columbus program.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Will Bishop, a 32-year-old software developer who moved back to his hometown of Columbus, Georgia, and got $5,000 from a city program to attract remote workers. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

The Move to Columbus program was sent to me by probably three family members and four friends. I just got a burst of texts.

I was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia. Before I moved back, I lived in Nashville for seven years and spent two years in Tucker, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta.

Columbus is a very different place than it was when I left nine years ago — it's grown a lot. It's thriving.

It's the familiarity of home, but it's also new and exciting because we didn't live in the same area that we moved to — so that has an added benefit.

A lot of people knew that we were already considering or at least thinking about moving to Columbus, so the timing was kind of serendipitous. We were trying to buy a house in Atlanta and it was a pretty disheartening experience.

That was the impetus for starting to look in Columbus. This program just lined up with the timing and also sped up our process. It could help with some of the moving costs.

My family and my wife's family are both in Columbus still, and we wanted to be closer to family. We thought we still wanted a bigger city, so we thought Atlanta would give us some of what we loved in Nashville, and then we'd get the benefit of being two hours from family.

We couldn't afford to buy a home in Atlanta

Real estate was definitely one of the most significant drivers for this decision.

We don't have experience buying, but we just bought our first house here in Columbus for $295,000.

We were renting in Nashville, and in Atlanta.

We shopped for probably a year in Atlanta. It's obviously tough right now, with interest rates being what they are, but the price per square foot there is definitely more than double the average here.

We were looking at houses in Atlanta that maybe were 1,000 square feet and were pushing our budget.

In Atlanta, we paid $1,700 a month, which was a really good deal. We actually made a deal with the landlord: I would cut the grass and he shaved off $200. It would've been probably 1,000 square feet.

In Columbus, we bought something that's 2,200 square feet and we're excited and proud of. Your money just goes significantly further in what you can purchase here.

Our mortgage in Columbus — with insurance and with everything you have to put in escrow — is about $2,500.

If we were to have bought Atlanta, that would've been either the same and we would have a smaller house — or it would've been more, still with a smaller house.

We wanted to buy a house that we could be in for 10 years — that was our thinking. We couldn't afford to do that in Atlanta.

The amenities in Columbus bolster the strong community

This is probably silly, but I grew up playing on these really nice clay tennis courts, and one of the memberships included in the program is a year membership to those tennis courts. It's hard to find really good clay courts and they're really fun to play on.

There are a ton of benefits, but it's also the accessibility to things. There's tons to do in Atlanta and Nashville, but they're not necessarily accessible and they're not affordable to live close to here.

I can actually afford to live next to this amazing public resource. There's this really great park that I'm a block away from that I never could have lived next to in Atlanta.

Part of why I really appreciate this program is because it has these community-building components.

It's really important to me as a remote worker — because you can just move to a city and be really confused about how to actually meet people without that network of coworkers.

This program has some built-in things to do, like going to meet other people who are part of this program, or to meet the mayor — just doing some outings with other people and getting connected. That was really exciting, too.

We wanted to move closer to family, and we're glad we did

I feel like we've done as much socially in these two months than we did in the last year in Atlanta.

In Atlanta, because of the driving and because it was just harder to make friends, it felt like this formal invitation: You set everything up two weeks in advance, then you drove 45 minutes to get there. It was just such an event.

Here, I feel like we've been really fortunate that a few friends have taken it upon themselves to introduce us to some groups. It feels like a few nights a week, we're just running into friends and then something comes of that.

Everything happens much more naturally here because you're closer to people, and that's really nice.

We've actually run into probably a dozen people who have also moved back to Columbus.

Being close to my family has been really sweet. We lost my grandma in February, and so we're getting to spend more time with my grandpa who's here in this time when he's grieving.

We went to lunch the other day and got ribs, and that's just something I couldn't really do as often from afar. I could call and check in, but getting to actually take him somewhere and hearing him open up about his time in the Navy and things like that — just being there for him right now is super important.

And showing the first house that you bought to your grandparents, for some reason, is really great for your self-confidence. It's just the sweetest experience.

I'm coming back to Columbus as a very different person than I was nine years ago. I'm more forward-looking and have different priorities, and Columbus lines up with us, fortunately.