Reddit Saves Daly City from Gentrification, Sort Of

Maybe he missed Jollibee

Reddit CEO Yishan Wong quit this week, and one of the issues he quit over was apparently the future location of the company.

He wanted to move to Daly City. 

Slate's Moneybox has the story: 

But that’s exactly how most techies view Daly City—as drive-through country. It claims few cultural attractions and scant entertainment options, beyond the monolithic Westlake and Serramonte malls and a semidefunct convention center called the Cow Palace that plays periodic host to rodeos and gun shows. Its principal private employers include Target, McDonald’s, and Walgreens.

And, unlike the suburbs further down the Peninsula, it lacks a quaint town center with restaurants and coffee shops. Despite its clumsy attempts at “transit-oriented development,” it’s utterly unwalkable. In case you don’t believe me, here is Daly City’s idea of a pedestrian-friendly plaza.

Contrast that with the location of Reddit’s current headquarters, at 520 3rd Street in San Francisco, and you can start to see why a faction of the company’s employees may have been aghast at the prospect of a move. Its office building, which it shares with Wired magazine, is among the more desirable addresses in what has become the hottest neighborhood in the world for tech startups.

The neighbors include Yelp, Square, and Dropbox. Across the street is the famous South Park playground where Jack Dorsey claims to have hatched the idea for Twitter. The San Francisco Giants play baseball a few blocks away. A move from there to Daly City is loosely comparable to a New York City fashion designer moving from Chelsea to Yonkers.

But it isn’t merely pride and snobbery that would make Reddit employees loath to pick up stakes for a San Mateo County office park. SoMa is easily accessible by foot and by transit from San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, where the majority of them presumably dwell. Daly City, for most, would require a lengthy, traffic-snarled commute—probably by car, or at best by park-and-ride. Many who do not own a car today would feel compelled to buy one, but finding a place to park it in San Francisco is the stuff of nightmares. A single parking spot there costs more per month than a one-bedroom apartment in most of the country.

Did I mention Wong planned to prohibit Reddit employees from working remotely?

More here.